Marco Polo Quotes

There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away.

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. 'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks. 'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.' Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.' Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.

I have not told the half of what I saw.

I did not write half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed

When Marco Polo came at last to Cathay, seven hundred years ago, did he not feel--and did his heart not falter as he realized--that this great and splendid capital of an empire had had its being all the years of his life and far longer, and that he had been ignorant of it? That it was in need of nothing from him, from Venice, from Europe? That it was full of wonders beyond his understanding? That his arrival was a matter of no importance whatever? We know that he felt these things, and so has many a traveler in foreign parts who did not know what he was going to find. There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.

I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed

My heart beats as much as I can breathe.

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.

There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a "discovery.

Since Marco Polo, he thought, this climate has defeated Western civilization.

Please Polo." What the hell? "It's Marco." "That's what I said.

You will hear it for yourselves, and it will surely fill you with wonder.

I’d like to play a game of Marco Polo—in the 13th century.

Here people was once used to be honourable: now they are all bad; they have kept one goodness: that they are greatest boozers.

Marco Polo sabía que lo que imaginan los hombres no es menos real que lo que llaman la realidad.

to my father’s amazement, was an ancient but clearly recognizable painting of Marco Polo, who must have visited Huai’an during his thirteenth-century travels about China. The priest asked my father to donate a picture of Jesus for his collection, and, after thinking about it, Daddy did.

There was a time when a book could be sold purely because its author had been to distant climes and had returned to tell of the exotic sights he had seen. That author was Marco Polo, and the time was the thirteenth century.

The personal appearance of the Great Kaan, Lord of Lords, whose name is Cublay, is such as I shall now tell you.

The map of the world is drawn by travelers and nomads. Built into it are steps, nights and days, stations and encounters.

You will hear it for yourself, and it will surely fill you with wonder.

I did not tell half of what I saw, for no one would have believed me. MARCO POLO, 1324

Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French,

Then, I will be a real Italian girl, instead of a total American who still can't hear someone across the street to his friend Marco without wanting instinctively to yell back "Polo!

Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.

Related lessons: Don’t go hunting ghosts, and don’t get too deep into a situation where your civilizational advantage is of little help.

national navies tend to cooperate better than national armies, partly because sailors are united by a kind of fellowship-of-the-sea born of their shared experience facing violent natural forces.

We go naked because we want nothing of this world; for we came into the world naked and unclothed. As for not being ashamed to show our members, the fact is that we do no sin with them and therefore have no more shame in them than you have when you show your hand or face or the other parts of your body that do not lead you into carnal sin; whereas you use your members to commit sin and lechery, and so you cover them up and are ashamed of them. But we are no more ashamed of showing them than we are of showing our fingers, because we do not sin with them.

Russia does not require an invasion, only a zone of influence in the Intermarium that it can achieve by gradually compromising the democratic vitality of rimland states. (Hungary, in particular, is well on its way in this regard.)

At this very moment we are breathing the same air that once was Marco Polo’s last breath. And we’re also breathing the same air that was Mozart’s first breath as a baby. you’re also breathing air that’s probably been queefed by Mata Hari, Cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe, which either way you look at it is pretty cool. So, while we’re breathing in the same molecules as Jesus, we’re also breathing in the same air as Pontius Pilot, Attila the Hun and an inmate on Death Row in San Quentin State Prison. We are linked to every other life form that has ever been on this planet because we literally breathe the same air.

Jerott?’ said Lymond. ‘What are you not saying?’ His eyes, as the orderly cavalcade paced through the muddy streets, had not left that forceful aquiline face since they met. And Jerott, Philippa saw with disbelief, flushed. For a moment longer, the strict blue eyes studied him; and then Lymond laughed. ‘She’s an eighteen-year-old blonde of doubtful virginity? Or more frightful still, an eighteen-year-old blonde of unstained innocence? I shall control my impulses, Jerott, I promise you. I’m only going to throw her out if she looks like a troublemaker, or else so bloody helpless that we’ll lose lives looking after her. Not everyone,’ he said, in a wheeling turn which caught Philippa straining cravenly to hear, ‘is one of Nature’s Marco Polos like the Somerville offspring.

Marco Polo, who wrote that Mongol couriers could cover 250 or even 300 miles in a single day. Reading historical tales about such exploits, one could be forgiven for imagining the steppe as a single flat grassland through which horsemen moved with a sense of freedom and ease. Here on horseback, though, it was clear the cavalry were negotiating deserts, mountains, rivers, swamps, heat, and frosts, and somehow keeping their horses fed and healthy, even before leaving Mongolia.

Marco Polo had been to China; Vasco de Gama had discovered the route to the Cape. The continent was in ferment, in movement, whereas the Mexican world was … absolutely hermetically closed. The arrival of the Spaniards must have been like the arrival of people from Mars... totally unsuspected aliens. The shock must have been profound…I think it’s one of the reasons behind the downfall of the Aztec Empire. In a sense, I think the Aztec Empire died of astonishment, more than anything else.

Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it.

Sea power is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics—to the extent that it can be shaped—in the face of an infernally complex and intractable situation on land.

The age of comparative anarchy is upon us.

In the interest of thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy, policy makers need to worry about how not to provoke more anarchy than the world has already seen.

Hiding doesn’t work if you go around yelling Marco Polo.

Though hardly a revolutionary insight, the comment set Pigafetta apart from sages such as Pliny and Marco Polo,

Into these pavilions he admitted the elect, and there, says Marco Polo, gave them to eat a certain herb, which transported them to Paradise, in the midst of ever-blooming shrubs, ever-ripe fruit, and ever-lovely virgins. What these happy persons took for reality was but a dream; but it was a dream so soft, so voluptuous, so enthralling, that they sold themselves body and soul to him who gave it to them, and obedient to his orders as to those of a deity, struck down the designated victim, died in torture without a murmur, believing that the death they underwent was but a quick transition to that life of delights of which the holy herb, now before you, had given them a slight foretaste.” “Then,” cried Franz, “it is hashish! I know that—by name at least.

those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies.

What benefit have the Hindus derived from their contact with Christian nations? The idea generally prevalent in this country about the morality and truthfulness of the Hindus evidently has been very low. Such seeds of enmity and hatred have been sown by the missionaries that it would be an almost Herculean task to establish better relations between India and America... If we examine Greek, Chinese, Persian, or Arabian writings on the Hindus, before foreigners invaded India, we find an impartial description of their national character. Megasthenes, the famous Greek ambassador, praises them for their love of truth and justice, for the absence of slavery, and for the chastity of their women. Arrian, in the second century, Hiouen-thsang, the famous Buddhist pilgrim in the seventh century, Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, have written in highest terms of praise of Hindu morality. The literature and philosophy of Ancient India have excited the admiration of all scholars, except Christian missionaries.

Immer wenn ich mich von einem Ort, der mir gefällt, verabschieden muss, habe ich das Gefühl, etwas von mir zurückzulassen. Wahrscheinlich besteht das Leben ganz unabhängig davon, ob man ein Vielreisender wie Marco Polo ist oder niemals in die Ferne zieht, aus einer Abfolge von Geburten und Toden. Ein Moment entsteht, ein Moment vergeht. Damit neue Erfahrungen an den Tag kommen können, müssen alte verblühen.

Because I live in south Florida I store cans of black beans and gallons of water in my closet in preparation for hurricane season. I throw a hurricane party in January. You’re my only guest. We play Marco Polo in bed. The sheets are wet like the roof caved in. There’s a million of me in you. You try to count me as I taste the sweat on the back of your neck. I call you Sexy Sexy, and we do everything twice. After, still sweating, we drink Crystal Light out of plastic water bottles. We discuss the pros and cons of vasectomies. It’s not invasive you say. I wrap the bedsheet around my waist. Minor surgery you say. You slur the word surgery, like it’s a garnish on a dish you just prepared. I eat your hair until you agree to no longer talk about vasectomies. We agree to have children someday, and that they will be beautiful even if they’re not. As I watch your eyes grow heavy like soggy clothes, I tell you When I grow up I’m going to be a famous writer. When I’m famous I’ll sign autographs on Etch-A-Sketches. I’ll write poems about writing other poems, so other poets will get me. You open your eyes long enough to tell me that when you grow up, you’re going to be a steamboat operator. Your pores can never be too clean you say. I say I like your pores just fine. I say Your pores are tops. I kiss you with my whole mouth, and you fall asleep next to my molars. In the morning, we eat french toast with powdered sugar. I wear the sugar like a mustache. You wear earmuffs and pretend we’re in a silent movie. I mouth Olive juice, but I really do love you. This is an awesome hurricane party you say, but it comes out as a yell because you can’t gauge your own volume with the earmuffs on. You yell I want to make something cute with you. I say Let me kiss the insides of your arms. You have no idea what I just said, but you like the way I smile.

With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius’s army marching into nowhere on an inhospitable steppe, in search of an enemy that never quite appears, is so powerful that it goes beyond mere symbolism.

The United States, like any nation—but especially because it is a great power—simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embraced and accepted.

America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.

There is still the EU, but also individual states, regions, and city-states, with liberalism barely holding off the forces of populist nationalism. To say that this does not undermine the strength of NATO is to be in denial,

The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO—those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic nations, and the protection of the individual no matter his race or religion. Democracy, after all, is less about elections than about impartial institutions.

Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty

Because it did used to be cool, super-cool, in fact - she was our Magellan, our Marco Polo, one of the wayward Walker women whose restless boundless spirit propels her from place to place, love to love, moment to unpredictable moment.

Whilst the food we eat nowadays has much to be grateful to the likes of Marco Polo, Alexander the Great and Vasco De Gama, who would have introduced the tangy flavours of South Africa’s Rainbow Cuisine on his way around the Cape of Good Hope to India, Arabic cuisine, with spices of cinnamon, cloves, saffron and ginger was a lot more enterprising than Western cooking at the time. The medley of colours that the spices offered the food had mystical meanings to the Arabs

I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo’s outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.

We must move away from domain control to domain denial, since our only motive to be on the ground in the Greater Middle East and Central Asia is for smackdown or disruption purposes. (In retrospect, that is how we should have handled Afghanistan after 9/11.)

the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?

The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation—and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that—with political order and stability.

The problem with a foreign policy driven foremost by Never Again! is that it ignores limits and the availability of resources. World War II had the secondary, moral effect of saving what was left of European Jewry. Its primary goal and effect was to restore the European and Asian balance of power in a manner tolerable to the United States—something that the Nazis and the Japanese fascists had overturned.

Al llegar a cada nueva ciudad el viajero encuentra un pasado suyo que ya no sabia que tenia: la extrañeza de los que no eres o no posees mas, te espera al paso en los lugares extraños y no poseidos. Marco [Polo] entra en una ciudad: ve a alguien que vive en una plaza una vida o un instante que podrian ser suyos; en el lugar de aquel hombre ahora hubiera podido estar el si se hubiese detenido en el tiempo mucho tiempo antes, o bien si mucho tiempo antes, en una encrucijada, en vez de tomar por un camino hubiese tomado por el opuesto y al cabo de una larga vuelta hubiera ido a encontrarse en el luhar de aquel hombre en aquella plaza. En adelante, de aquel pasado suyo verdadero o hipotetico, el queda excluido; no puede detenerse; debe continuar hasta otra ciudad donde lo espera otro pasado suyo, o algo que quizas habia sido un posible futuro y ahora es el presente de algun otro. Los futuros no realizados son solo ramas del pasado: ramas secas. -¿Viajas para revivir tu pasado?-era en ese momento la pregunta del Kan, que podia tambien formularse asi: ¿Viajas para encontrar tu futuro? Y la respuesta de Marco: -El otro lado es un espejo en negativo. El viajero reconoce lo poco que es suyo al descubrir lo mucho que no ha tenido y no tendra.

Marco reported that homeless children [in Kublai Kahn's city of Daidu] were cared for and educated. While he says little about the system of education in China, we know from records of the time that Kublai Khan created thousands of public schools to provide a basic education for all children, including those of poor peasants. Until then, only the wealthy were literate. Kublai's bid at 'universal education' had never been attempted by any country on Earth. In the western world, nearly 500 years would pass before governments began to take responsibility for the public education of all children.

Civilizations often prosper in opposition to others. Just as Christendom achieved form and substance in opposition to Islam after the latter’s conquest of North Africa and the Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, the West forged a definitive geopolitical paradigm in opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

We assume, without too much thinking, that any regime change in these places will be for the better. But it easily could be for the worse. Both Putin and Xi Jinping are rational actors, holding back more extreme elements. They are bold, but not crazy. The idea that more liberal regimes might replace them is an illusion.

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 you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

En la plaza está la pequeña pared de los viejos que miran pasar la juventud; el hombre está sentado en fila con ellos. Los deseos son ya recuerdos. (Ciudad Isadora)

Moreover, no public woman resides inside the city, but all such abide outside in the suburbs. And 'tis wonderful what a vast number of these are for the foreigners; ...

The inhabitants are all Idolaters. And I may as well remind you again [implied sigh?] that all the people of Cathay are Idolaters.

But beyond the extravagance of Rome's wealthiest citizens and flamboyant gourmands, a more restrained cuisine emerged for the masses: breads baked with emmer wheat; polenta made from ground barley; cheese, fresh and aged, made from the milk of cows and sheep; pork sausages and cured meats; vegetables grown in the fertile soil along the Tiber. In these staples, more than the spice-rubbed game and wine-soaked feasts of Apicius and his ilk, we see the earliest signs of Italian cuisine taking shape. The pillars of Italian cuisine, like the pillars of the Pantheon, are indeed old and sturdy. The arrival of pasta to Italy is a subject of deep, rancorous debate, but despite the legend that Marco Polo returned from his trip to Asia with ramen noodles in his satchel, historians believe that pasta has been eaten on the Italian peninsula since at least the Etruscan time. Pizza as we know it didn't hit the streets of Naples until the seventeenth century, when Old World tomato and, eventually, cheese, but the foundations were forged in the fires of Pompeii, where archaeologists have discovered 2,000-year-old ovens of the same size and shape as the modern wood-burning oven. Sheep's- and cow's-milk cheeses sold in the daily markets of ancient Rome were crude precursors of pecorino and Parmesan, cheeses that literally and figuratively hold vast swaths of Italian cuisine together. Olives and wine were fundamental for rich and poor alike.

As we learned to our horror at the turn of the twentieth century in the Philippines, as well as in the 1960s in Vietnam, and again in the last decade in Iraq, to invade is to govern. Once you decide to send in ground forces in significant numbers, it becomes your job to administer the territory you’ve just conquered—or to identify someone immediately who can.

When Marco Polo came at last to Cathay, seven hundred years ago, did he not feel—and did his heart not falter as he realized—that this great and splendid capital of an empire had had its being all the years of his life and far longer, and that he had been ignorant of it? That it was in need of nothing from him, from Venice, from Europe? That it was full of wonders beyond his understanding? That his arrival was a matter of no importance whatever? We know that he felt these things, and so has many a traveler in foreign parts who did not know what he was going to find. There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.

The current Chinese regime’s proposed land-and-maritime Silk Road duplicates exactly the one Marco Polo traveled. This is no coincidence. The Mongols, whose Yuan Dynasty ruled China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were, in fact, “early practitioners of globalization,” seeking to connect the whole of habitable Eurasia in a truly multicultural empire.

while our position has been eroding, the internal positions of Eurasia’s two principal hinge states, Russia and China, have been eroding further. They have ethnic, political, and economic challenges of a fundamental, structural kind compared to which ours pale in significance. Their very future stability and existence as unitary states can be questioned, whereas ours cannot.

Then Marco Polo spoke: “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist.

both Russia and China are dictatorships, not democracies. Therefore, losing face for them would be much more catastrophic than it would be for an American president. Politically speaking, they may be unable to give up the fight. And so we, too, might have to fight on, until there is some form of a regime change, or a substantial reduction in Moscow’s or Beijing’s military capacity

tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying various wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tubs in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger seagoing junks to carry heavy loads of cargo and ports to handle them. They improved the use of the compass in navigation and learned to produce more accurate nautical charts. The route from the port of Zaytun in southern China to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf became the main sea link between the Far East and the Middle East, and was used by both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, among others.

When Ferdinand Magellan attempted his circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century, he had to assure his nervous, uneducated mariners that they would not in fact fall off the edge of the earth.

We travelled with a bookshelf fixed above the back of our seat. The poor books were shaken madly during all these days, but we rejoiced to be able to lay our hand on the right volume at the right moment. Rubbing against each other were Marco Polo, Pelliot, Evans-Wentz, Vivekananda, Maritain, Jung, a life of Alexander the Great, Grousset, the Zend-Avesta. I picked The Darvishes by John P. Brown and H. A. Rose, and read aloud a passage about Jalal-ud-din Rumi.

Magellan, who left nothing to accident, had an assignment for Pigafetta; the young Italian diplomat was to keep a record of the voyage, not the dry, factual pilot’s log, but a more personal, anecdotal, and free-flowing account in the tradition of other popular travel works of the day; these included books by Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa; Ludovico di Varthema, another Italian visitor to the Indies; and Marco Polo, the most celebrated Italian traveler of them all. Making

If the United States helps topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, then what will it do on Thursday, when it finds that it has helped midwife to power a Sunni jihadist regime, or on Friday, when ethnic cleansing of the Shia-trending Alawites commences?

Benim Marco Polo'mun kalbinde yatan, insanları kentlerde yaşatan gizli nedenleri, krizlerin ötesinde değerleri olan nedenleri keşfetmek. Kentler birçok şeyin bir araya gelmesidir: Anıların, arzuların, bir dilin işaretlerinin. Kentler takas yerleridir, tıpkı bütün ekonomi tarihi kitaplarında anlatıldığı gibi, ama bu değiş-tokuşlar yalnızca ticari takaslar değil; kelime, arzu ve anı değiş-tokuşlarıdır. Kitabım, mutsuz kentlerin içine gizlenmiş, sürekli biçim alıp, yitip giden mutlu kentler imgesi üzerine açılıp kapanıyor.

despite the threats of Russian and Chinese expansionism, particularly in the Baltic, Black, and South China seas, the more important underlying dynamic will be the crises of central control inside Russia and China themselves as their authoritarian systems degenerate

The relative obscurity of Day’s autobiography and other books like it about Vietnam constitute a lesser-known aspect of our civilian-military divide. The books to which I refer should be part of our recollection of Vietnam, but they generally aren’t. They aren’t so much stories that soldiers tell civilians as those that soldiers tell each other.

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them...It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that our corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termite's gnawing.

The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America’s greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically

And so here is Shreya, saying “Polo” to me from across the great divide. But she is also saying “Marco.” She is also telling me to hear her voice, and answer her call. People often ask me why I’m obsessed with tuberculosis. I’m a novelist, not a historian of medicine. TB is rare where I live. It doesn’t affect me. And that’s all true. But I hear Shreya, and Henry, and so many others calling to me: Marco. Marco. Marco.

Alexander laughs. They kiss exuberantly. “Now—much more seriously,” she says, “what would you like to play, Captain? Marco Polo?” “How about Little Red Riding Tania?” he says, all teeth. “Okey-dokey.” Making her voice high high high, she says gamely, batting her eyes, “Oh, Captain, what big arms you have...” “All the better to hold you with, my dear.” He squeezes her wet body to him. “Oh, Captain, what big hands you have...” “All the better to grab you with, my dear.” He grabs her behind and presses into her. “Oh, my, Captain! What a—” Anthony takes a running jump, right into the pool, right into his mother and father. Alexander pushes his son underwater and when he releases him, Tatiana pushes her son underwater, and when she releases him they both embrace him and kiss his face. “Ant, want to play Marco Polo?” “Yes, Dad,” says Anthony. “You’re it. And no chasing only Mommy this time.

On a souvent dit, au vu de ces scènes irréelles, que les hommes de Hassan [Sabbah] étaient drogués. Comment expliquer autrement qu'ils [l'Ordre des Assassins] aillent au-devant de la mort avec le sourire ? On a accrédité la thèse qu'ils agissaient sous l'effet du haschisch. Marco Polo a popularisé cette idée en Occident ; leurs ennemis dans le monde musulman les ont parfois appelés haschichiyoun, "fumeurs de haschisch", pour les déconsidérer ; certains orientalistes ont cru voir dans ce terme l'origine du mot "assassin" qui est devenu, dans plusieurs langues européennes, synonyme de meurtrier. Le mythe des "Assassins" n'en a été que plus terrifiant. La vérité est autre. D'après les textes qui nous sont parvenus d'Alamout, Hassan aimait à appeler ses adeptes Assassiyoun, ceux qui sont fidèles au Assass [أساس], au "Fondement" de la foi, et c'est ce mot, mal compris des voyageurs étrangers, qui a semblé avoir des relents de haschisch.

She was floating, arms outspread, water lapping her body, breathing in a summery fragrance of salt and coconut. There was a pleasantly satisfied breakfast taste in her mouth of bacon and coffee and possibly croissants. She lifted her chin and the morning sun shone so brightly on the water, she had to squint through spangles of light to see her feet in front of her. Her toenails were each painted a different color. Red. Gold. Purple. Funny. The nail polish hadn’t been applied very well. Blobby and messy. Someone else was floating in the water right next to her. Someone she liked a lot, who made her laugh, with toenails painted the same way. The other person waggled multicolored toes at her companionably, and she was filled with sleepy contentment. Somewhere in the distance, a man’s voice shouted, “Marco?” and a chorus of children’s voices cried back, “Polo!” The man called out again, “Marco, Marco, Marco?” and the voices answered, “Polo, Polo, Polo!” A child laughed; a long, gurgling giggle, like a stream of soap bubbles.

I’d been reborn since Marlboro Man had entered my life; his wild abandon and unabashed passion had freed me from the shackles of cynicism, from thinking that love had to be something to labor over or agonize about. He’d ridden into my life on a speckled gray horse and had saved my heart from hardness. He’d taught me that when you love someone, you say it--and that when it comes to matters of the heart, games are for pimply sixteen-year-olds. Up until then that’s all I’d been: a child masquerading as a disillusioned adult, looking at love much as I’d looked at a round of Marco Polo in the pool at the country club: when they swam after me, I’d swim away. And there are accusations of peeking and cheating, and you always wind up sunburned and pruney and pooped. And no one ever wins. It was Marlboro Man who’d helped me out of the pool, wrapped a towel around my blistering shoulders, and carried me to a world where love has nothing to do with competition or sport or strategy. He told me he loved me when he felt like it, when he thought of it. He never saw any reason not to.

If it be questioned how the population of the country can supply sufficient numbers of these duties, and by what means they can be supported, we may answer, that all the idolaters, and likewise the Saracens, keep six, eight, or ten women, according to their circumstances, by whom they have a prodigious number of children. Some of them have as many as thirty sons capable of following their fathers in arms; whereas with us a man has only one wife, and even although she should prove barren, he is obliged to pass his life with her, and is by that means deprived of the chance of raising a family. Hence it is that our population is so much inferior to theirs.

Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco’s return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West. Coal, another item that had caught Marco’s attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe. Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses), which some accounts say he brought back with him, became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight. In addition, lenses gave rise to the telescope—which in turn revolutionized naval battles, since it allowed combatants to view ships at a great distance—and the microscope. Two hundred years later, Galileo used the telescope—based on the same technology—to revolutionize science and cosmology by supporting and disseminating the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare as armies exchanged their lances, swords, and crossbows for cannon, portable harquebuses, and pistols. Marco brought back gifts of a more personal nature as well. The golden paiza, or passport, given to him by Kublai Khan had seen him through years of travel, war, and hardship. Marco kept it still, and would to the end of his days. He also brought back a Mongol servant, whom he named Peter, a living reminder of the status he had once enjoyed in a far-off land. In all, it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance—or, for that matter, the modern world—without the benefit of Marco Polo’s example of cultural transmission between East and West.

The shift from precious metals to paper in retrospect clarifies that artifacts serving as money tokens are no more than representations of abstract exchange value—they are thus ultimately coveted for their potential use in social transaction, nor for some imagined, essential value intrinsic to the money tokens themselves. If it were not for international agreements such as those of Bretton Woods, gold could conceivably be as useless a medium of exchange in some cultural contexts as seashells are to modern Europeans. This understanding of money, however, simultaneously implies that there is no such thing as intrinsic value. If value ubiquitously pertains to social relations, any notion of intrinsic value is an illusion. Although the European plundering and hoarding of gold and silver, like the Melanesian preoccupation with kula and the Andean reverence for Spondylus, has certainly been founded on such essentialist conceptions of value, the recent representation of exchange value in the form of electronic digits on computer screens is a logical trajectory of the kind of transformation propagated by [Marco] Polo. It is difficult to imagine how money appearing as electronic information could be perceived as possessing intrinsic value. This suggests that electronic money, although currently maligned as the root of the financial crisis, could potentially help us rid ourselves of money fetishism. Paradoxically, the progressive detachment of money from matter, obvious in the transitions from metals through paper to electronics, is simultaneously a source of critique and a source of hope.

She was floating, arms outspread, water lapping her body, breathing in a summery fragrance of salt and coconut. There was a pleasantly satisfied breakfast taste in her mouth of bacon and coffee and possibly croissants. She lifted her chin and the morning sun shone so brightly on the water, she had to squint through spangles of light to see her feet in front of her. Her toenails were each painted a different color. Red. Gold. Purple. Funny. The nail polish hadn’t been applied very well. Blobby and messy. Someone else was floating in the water right next to her. Someone she liked a lot, who made her laugh, with toenails painted the same way. The other person waggled multicolored toes at her companionably, and she was filled with sleepy contentment. Somewhere in the distance, a man’s voice shouted, “Marco?” and a chorus of children’s voices cried back, “Polo!” The man called out again, “Marco, Marco, Marco?” and the voices answered, “Polo, Polo, Polo!” A child laughed; a long, gurgling giggle, like a stream of soap bubbles. A voice said quietly and insistently in her ear, “Alice?” and she tipped back her head and let the cool water slide silently over her face. Tiny dots of light danced before her eyes. Was it a dream or a memory? “I don’t know!” said a frightened voice. “I didn’t see it happen!” No need to get your knickers in a knot. The dream or memory or whatever it was dissolved and vanished like a reflection on water, and instead fragments of thought began to drift through her head, as if she were waking up from a long, deep sleep, late on a Sunday morning. Is cream cheese considered a soft cheese? It’s not a hard cheese. It’s not . . . . . . hard at all. So, logically, you would think . . . . . . something. Something logical. Lavender is lovely. Logically lovely. Must prune back the lavender! I can smell lavender. No, I can’t. Yes, I can. That’s when she noticed the pain in her head for the first time. It hurt on one side, a lot, as if someone had given her a good solid thwack with a baseball bat. Her thoughts sharpened. What was this pain in the head all about?

Not since the days of Athens and Sparta had Europe seen an era of violent civic pride like the one that covered the Italian peninsula in the age of Dante and Marco Polo. But then the trend changed. The days of affluence and confidence ebbed away. The coming of the Black Death in 1348, which killed off at least one-third of Italy’s population, was the coup de grâce. The wars became more desperate and the mercenary captain or condottiere, who led a city’s army to plunder its neighbors, more necessary.

By broadening your horizons,” he ventured, “what I meant is that education will give you a sense of the world’s scope, of its wonders, of its many and varied ways of life.” “Wouldn’t travel achieve that more effectively?” “Travel?” “We are talking about horizons, aren’t we? That horizontal line at the limit of sight? Rather than sitting in orderly rows in a schoolhouse, wouldn’t one be better served by working her way toward an actual horizon, so that she could see what lay beyond it? That’s what Marco Polo did when he traveled to China. And what Columbus did when he traveled to America. And what Peter the Great did when he traveled through Europe incognito!

Western attitudes toward Chinese and Japanese religions were formed largely from the descriptions given by Christian missionaries to those countries. Earlier accounts provided by travelers, such as Marco Polo, John of Montecorvino, Odoric of Pordenone, and others, were too vague and never mentioned the Buddhist sects as such (Demiéville 1964). So misleading, for instance, was Marco Polo's description of Cathay that it took some fifteen years for the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to realize that this empire was none other than China.

Venedik, tamamı 118 tane olan bir dizi cezbedici adanın ortasında düşmanlarından korunuyordu.

Marco Polo descrive un ponte, pietra per pietra. – Ma qual è la pietra che sostiene il ponte? – chiede Kublai Kan. – Il ponte non è sostenuto da questa o da quella pietra, – risponde Marco, – ma dalla linea dell’arco che esse formano. Kublai Kan rimase silenzioso, riflettendo. Poi soggiunse: – Perché mi parli delle pietre? È solo dell’arco che mi importa. Polo risponde: – Senza pietre non c’è arco.

When Marco Polo first saw rhinos, he thought they were unicorns.

Não é o espelho que denuncia a beleza. Ela está nos olhos do observador! Não é a maciez da cama que determina o sono, mas a mente de quem dorme – afirmou Marco Polo com propriedade.

sprezzatura,

Ser feliz é contemplar a assinatura do Autor da Existência nas coisas simples e anônimas. É se deslumbrar com a chuva e com o sol. É recomeçar tudo de novo quando necessário.