Cities and Signs. 3.

The traveler who does not yet know the city which awaits him on down the road wonders what the palaces, barracks, mill, theater, or market will be like. In every city in the empire, each building is unique and constructed in a different arrangement. Yet as soon as the stranger arrives in an unknown city and casts his gaze over its jumble of pagodas and gables and haylofts, tracing the squiggles of canals gardens garbage dumps, he immediately identifies which are the princes’ palaces, which are the high priests’ temples, the inns, the prisons, the slums. Thus (so they say) proving the theory that every man carries in his mind a city made solely of variations, a city without figures or form, which he then fills in with particular cities.

Not so with Zoe. In any part of this city, you might, at different moments in time, sleep, forge tools, cook, amass gold, undress, reign, sell your wares, or consult with oracles. Any pyramidal roof might shelter a leper colony just as easily as it might an odalisque bathhouse. The traveler wanders aimlessly through it with nothing but doubt: unable to distinguish the city's landmarks, even the points he keeps distinct in his mind begin to blur together. One may infer the following: if existence, in every one of its moments, is fully itself, then the city of Zoe is the place of indivisible existence. But why then a city? What boundary separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howling of wolves?