AT A CERTAIN TIME A LARGE NUMBER OF DARK STARS APPEARED in the sky of permanent stars which was suspended above the sky of clouds and below the sky of suns and moons. These were said to be merely ordinary stars that differed from others only in that for some reason they had died. And since they no longer shone they had become invisible. They were smashed to pieces by the helicopters of the municipal transit system which were roaming aimlessly beneath the vault of the sky without fuel, which they could not refill since there was nowhere to land: The landing pads on the rooftops had never been built and now they were overgrown with dense jungles of antennas.
The fragile lustrous substance that the stars were made of lost its transparent quality after the collisions and rained down on the city as a black dust. From it the plaster darkened. With time the buildings took on the same shade of gray as the cloudy sky and in this manner disappeared. As the problem of the power supply worsened successive stars were extinguished and ever greater quantities of black dust accumulated, falling like a shadow on sky and earth and obscuring every source of light, including the sun. The eyes of passersby skimmed over the tops of façades lost in the clouds. No one enjoyed any of the wonders of the city. The stone bricklayers in their stone clothing stood alone on heavy stone legs in the recesses of walls, needlessly wielding their pickaxes. With pigeons puffed up from the cold perched on their heads they endured, unnoticed, in the darkness of the street. The buildings, clouds and earth were all cloaked in the same hue and even the birds melted into the background. It was easier to see them in stamp albums, where at least they were not freezing.
No one knows where sorrow comes from in a city. It has no foundations; it is not built of bricks or screwed together from threaded pipes; it does not flow through electric cables nor is it brought by cargo trains. Sorrow drifts amongst the apartment buildings like a fine mist that the wind blows unevenly across the streets, squares and courtyards. There are long streets and short ones, there are broad ones and narrow ones. The gray of some bears a trace of ochre while others are bluish from the sidewalks to the roof tiles. Each of them has its own peculiar shade of sorrow. Those it has liberally coated and those it has marked with only a barely perceptible shadow run together, intersect and separate. Their length, breadth and angles of intersection influence the circulation of sorrow. Its volume and kind change every day in the city just like the weather. Here and there a small point of joy appears and a zone of joy begins to expand in wedges down streets enveloped in sorrow; its advance parts pass over the roofs of buildings like an atmospheric front. There are streets on which the flags of the sidewalk are loose and there is always a smell of cabbage and bacon while on Saturdays noise and music can be heard on every corner. Each Monday the place is filled with a dreary silence interrupted at infrequent moments by the slamming of doors and the sound of hoarse voices.
From a certain point of view sorrow might be regarded as an alternative form of enthusiasm which from the beginning was included in the plans for the city but — like everything in the world — proved not sufficiently durable and sooner or later had to turn into its opposite. Sorrow is what enthusiasm becomes when its explosion passes its highest point, after which implosion inevitably follows.
These were the discoveries of the inhabitants as they sought new rules in feverish desperation. For without rules life is lived in an intolerable uncertainty. Rules too are of little help. They do not enable one to touch either enthusiasm or sorrow, much less the causes of their appearance and disappearance. Little can be encompassed with the gaze — no more than a street corner or one side of a square, sometimes a sign over a store or a lace curtain in a window. Thoughts and imaginings, unlike walls, can be seen without opening one’s eyes. This entire city standing here below on earth and covered with the dome of heaven is suspended in another vaster space where the names of all things and states arise and circulate and out of which thoughts emerge. Even the blind tapping the sidewalks with their white canes, their gaze fixed on the inside of their heads, never cease to be aware of the fact that something is rising or subsiding in that abyss.
Beneath the vaults of skulls there extend boundless expanses where no human has set foot and which contain things that are in plain view yet cannot be touched. Whereas that which is tangible endures in places trodden by feet yet closed to thoughts. The stone bricklayers will not see anything beyond what is seen by any brick or roof tile, though they stare untiringly without blinking day and night. Everything around them has its place yet nothing has a name. The city trodden by feet and the city in which thoughts swirl adjoin each other at the lens of the eye, by which they are scrupulously separated. Even the blind see what is most important: limitless darkness like the night sky, in which the constellations of the names of all things are scattered, shining and dying like stars.
This vast expanse is curved in such a curious way that everything that can be thought is always situated inside it. It can be crossed without the slightest effort; there is no need even to open one’s eyes, for everyone knows what a telephone booth looks like, a bus or an opera house. It is woven from that which one knows without looking. And even if it never existed the telephone booth will always be found on the right corner exactly at the moment the bus pulls up at the stop in front of the opera house. It is enough to utter the appropriate word in order to summon up in an instant all the corners of that incorporeal city, all the signs above the stores and also all the bus stops — including those that exist only in someone’s mistaken memory — and all the telephone booths, at every hour of the day and night, in rain, frost and swelter. All the buildings and all their windows on every floor, every newspaper kiosk seen from the first floor and from the attic, from the front and from an angle. It should be added here that in the rows of windows, on some floor a window will always be found through which instead of a kiosk one can see for instance a large building with a clock tower, since it too belongs to the city, just like fading recollections, unrealized plans, and dreams. Everything that can be thought has its name and — along with the trams, safety pins and rosin — belongs to the city.
Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another. Memory must constantly untangle them since permanent order is not possible there. The city can neither be described nor drawn; the reality of the city blocks is resistant to orthogonal projection. Cut off from the sky, deprived of clouds reflected in the window panes, they will rather recall that which remains of streets after they are demolished: an outline of foundations. By manipulating the scale it is possible to create roadways on which the make of a car will squeeze by without difficulty, maybe the color of the bodywork too, but the wheels cannot pass. Every attempt to render a permanent image of the city multiplies similarly defective nooks and crannies which from that instant on assume a life of their own. Thus it is not possible to depict the city in two dimensions regardless of whether they are situated on paper, on a screen or in the memory.