invisible cities-italo calvino

at this point kublai khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or marco polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “you advance always with your head turned back?” or “is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “does your journey take place only in the past?”
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 jouney, 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.