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| image courtesy of designplaygrounds.com |
- How does Marco Polo really know what he claims to know of Zora as it no longer exists? And the vignette's final paragraph reflects interestingly against the first sentence, which states of Zora that, "no one, having seen it, can forget." So when it's gone... what? Memory cannot be inherited, after all.
- I mentioned synecdoche and metonymy in the last post about Tamara. Inasmuch as either of these is a sort of--and maybe this is a stretch--mnemonic (and more so than just another crazy spelling) are all of the disparate and unforgettable points, all mnemonics really, synecdochic or metonymic of the whole--all for one and one for all?
- If the most learned men are those who've memorized Zora and anyone who visits Zora cannot forget it, wouldn't anyone who simply visits and sees [all of] Zora become another of the most learned men?
- This city is a little difficult for me to grasp. Is it set up as it is only be ironic in the end? This alone would make sense, but it leaves Zora otherwise shallower than the preceding cities.
- Well, maybe not. The whole notion of this city's memorableness together with its passing reminds me of the danger faced by the general world's public by the loss of a culture. Loss of a spoken language. Loss of oral traditions. Loss of purity in aboriginal bloodlines. Once lost, it will never return. Some things, no matter the scholarship that pursues it after its demise, will never be brought back. Only Jurassic Park managed that.
1. I'm not sure that this makes sense, but it does fit in well with the idea of dawn. I took it to represent sort of the familiar memories of childhood. You can remember everything about it, even though most of it was mundane, but you can never really return to the "city" once you've left it.
ReplyDelete2. Not sure.
3. The most learned man is the one who doesn't forget what he learned in childhood?
5. Yeah, I think that's true, too.
1. I think, after having reread the next one (or the one after?), maybe it really is set up just to be ironic and even rhetorical. The problem is, I know how these strange cities--like this one--fit into the whole, which makes it a little difficult to dissect apart from the others.
ReplyDelete3. Everything I ever need to know I learned in kindergarten.