Trading Cities 3

…”Eutropia is not one, but all these cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty, and this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall tell you how. On the day when Eutropia's inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip(...) The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents(...) Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle” (Calvino, 1974, p. 64)