Later, we will think of cities as the beginning and end of existence. In this last borderland between mortar and life, vegetation is replaced with the regulating lines of buildings and structures, with statues of men inscribed with famous decrees, with the cultivation of concrete. In this way, in the space of the open fields and streets, the deceased preserve their names and likelinesses by means of monuments of stone and bronze. And in the agoras, men sit at tables and eat bouillabaise and recall memories of time manipulation, when they were once young and immortal, and when traitors were hanged by the neck in the shade of the very trees they are sitting under. To all but the best of historiographers, these people pass their lives unnoticed. If I were to stand on the outskirts of the city and watch the effects of time, I could say that the following is true: the schools study physics and mineralogy, women pose naked in the light of the windows at night, governments construct battlements and crenellated walls by way of keeping themselves in. To me, the blowing sand makes pockmarks in the masonry, making way for the first germination of the convolvuluses that will emerge from the cracks in the gypsum. After the last of the bricks have crumbled and the names of the royal lineage have been forgotten, I will still be able to see this city as if it still stood. There will be the fragments laid out piecemeal in the mind's eye: striation patterns in the regional wood, the smell of the latrines, the yearly reincarnation of its birds, and acts of physical impossibility. Centuries later, the city is rebuilt. All its inhabitants are mute. They spend time retracing its skyline and topologies and restoring its ephemera. They live not their own history, but that of their predecessors. In the streets, the pedestrians carefully fall in time with the cadence of those before them.
