亞馬遜給我推薦一本叫《隱城》（Invisible Cities）的書。看了。

摘錄自卡爾維諾《隱城》:
Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan's mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.

這段的大概意思是，大汗發現馬可波羅說的城，每個組成元素都差不多。馬可波羅在一旁描述，大汗也不認真聽了，腦子里就把之前描述過的城的元素拆了重新組合，然后跟馬可波羅說，看，你說的我都知道，我不出門也能經歷了你說的這些城。

"From the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. "……"Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."

然后馬可波羅回答，不然，每個城的元素都是有機組合在一起的。如果一個城真的只是簡單的元素堆砌，而這些元素沒有有機關聯，沒有潛藏規律，背后沒有想法，理念和靈魂，那么這樣的城并無想象的價值。城就像夢，夢里能見到想象力所及的一切，然而夢的核心是欲望與恐懼。同理，沒有欲望和恐懼就不成城了。城也相信自己或者是應運而生，或者是設計而成。然而你愛一個城，并不是因為里面有你愛的那些元素，而是因為它給了你一些答案，一些和內心想法暗相呼應的答案。

很多年以前，我寫過一篇《旅行的意義》，大概的意思是說，旅行其實看不到什么新的東西，最多只是在途中讀自己的心。后來去世界最大的尼亞瓜拉瀑布，感覺大自然之威不外如是之后，就很少出游了。就在像文中的大汗一樣，只靠想象力把萬物排列組合，覺得更好。

這個書倒是給了我一個新的視角來看旅行的意義。別用腦子看，用心看，它會撥動你心中的弦的。想想也對啊，漢詩也都是那么些元素排列組合，天對地雨對風大陸對長空山花對海樹赤日對蒼穹。可是漢詩卻能寫盡萬千心緒，李杜詩篇萬古流傳。原來如此嘛。

書不錯。