Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It’s a novel, simply a fictitious narrative.
Journey to the End of the Night.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline. 1932.
Cubicity is an experimental project -
deconstructing and reconstructing stories and objects.
This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory.
Invisible Cities. Italo Calvino. 1972.
Only the object haunted me, the separate detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter ... I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, attracted and endeared me.
Henry Miller. Tropic of Capricorn. 1993.
The boy treasured anything discarded. He took his education peculiarly and lived an entirely secret intellectual life. In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect. He was alert not only to discarded materials but to unexpected events and coincidences. It was evident to him that the world composed and decomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
Ragtime. E.L. Doctorow. 1975.
