OK, just like every new stage of life i end up in, i often find myself reminiscing about what used to be, and to my detriment, often paint the past a prettier picture than it deserves. Not to say that my past has not been good, or even fantastic, but it also has always been real. This trait of looking back only to the good things allows my expectations for the present to soar, and to come to the conclusion that the NOW is not as great as it should be. Then i come upon Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and a passage that hits upon the traveler's condition with place and memory.

Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: "You always advance with your head turned back" or "is what you see always behind you?" or rather ,"does your journey take place only in the past?"

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining, or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past, it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what what you no longer are or no longer possess lie in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Marco enters a city, he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago, or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. by now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

"Journeys to relive your past?" was the Khan's question at this point, a question that could have been formulated "Journeys to recover your future?"

And Marco's answer was: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."