Reflections and Reflections

The Great Khan stops sending Marco Polo on missions, and now the two listen to each other as the merchant develops new cities through chess pieces. Marco Polo adeptly teaches the conqueror details are essential and that only by looking at wood many things may be learned. In one occasion, Marco Polo quickly identifies traces in the wood used for the chessboard as indications of severe winters or droughts. He also finds the techniques used to cut the trees down, with these observations Kublai Khan slowly learns the importance of details. A value many of us do not appreciate correctly.

            One day, after many games were played Kublai states he lost the purpose of the game and could no longer understand why they still played them. Through this games he arrived to what he calls “the definitive conquest”, this conclusion argued his “empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes…nothingness” (123). Kublai has come to accept the fact that knowledge is above any material possession. That the richness he holds as the Khan of the largest empire at the time, is not within the treasures he receives from ambassadors, but at the details of each new place. Additionally, he seems to understand Kings and Empires would come and go, and just like in chess when a King falls nothing remains. That is what his Empire is: nothingness.

            As the end approaches Marco Polo declares a very important truth: “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear” (135). Meaning that, it is not the person who tells the story who controls it, but the individual hearing it, since he is the one who interprets it and learns it through his own perspective. Humans tend to neglect the truth they hear for their personal convenience; as a result a story that may originate from the same source may have dozens of different sides to it. Ideally, details should be kept intact, so that way the truth does so as well. Which leads Marco Polo to declare it is does differences that enable someone to entirely comprehend a city and hence life itself. It is “that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name” that ensure one has gotten the true meaning of a place (137). Moreover, this quality allows the atlas to predict the form of future cities and its successors, like New Amsterdam that will later become New York and shapeless cities like Kyoto-Osaka, also find their place in the atlas.

            In the final pages the merchant and the conqueror discuss their final question, what to do next? Marco Polo wants to create the perfect city through recompilations of other ones until equilibrium is attained. However, Kublai Khan wanders if they are all going to hell, since that seems to be the way they are getting to: “the infernal city” (165). But Marco Polo tells him that there can only be one inferno for the living, “the inferno where we live in”, an inferno that seems inescapable to most (165). For most live a life of complacency and embrace the hell they dwell. Others, very few and who work very hard not to be part of hell, are the ones who must “endure and be given space”, these are not part of the inferno and face very difficult tasks not to be so (165).