Cities and Desire. 4.

At the center of Fedora, a metropolis of gray stone, stands a metal building with a glass sphere in every room. Looking into each sphere, one sees a bluish city that is the model of another Fedora. These are the forms the city might have taken had it not, for one reason or another, become the city we see today. In every age, someone who found themselves looking at Fedora as it was had imagined how to turn it into the ideal city. And yet, even as they were building their miniature model, Fedora was no longer as it had been, and what until yesterday had been a possible future was now merely a plaything inside of a glass sphere.

Fedora now has its museum in the building of spheres: every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to their desires, and gazes at it, imagining themselves reflected in the pool of jellyfish meant to collect the canal waters (if the canal had not been drained), walking along at the height of a canopy on the avenue reserved for elephants (now banished from the city), or sliding down the spiral of the cochleate minaret (which can no longer find the base on which to rise).

On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room for both the great stone Fedora and the small Fedoras in the glass spheres. Not because they are all equally real, but because they are all purely speculative. The one encompasses what has been accepted as necessary even though it is not yet so; the others, what has been imagined as possible and an instant later is no longer so.