There once was a mapmaker who drew places.
Yes, you might say. Isn’t that what cartographers do?
Yet this mapmaker did not call himself a cartographer. He did not employ compasses or sextants or even a telescope. He did not climb mountains or sail coastlines or cross deserts. In fact, it was a rare occasion that he even left his attic workshop. He could see most of Paris from the circular window by his drafting table—mazes of mansard roofs that spelled out strange alphabets. It was easy enough to copy. He’d seen it take shape over the years, spilling out of the river and growing through the marshlands, while men’s hands carved out catacombs and conjured cathedrals.
This was one way to build a city.
The mapmaker had mastered another. He worked by the light of his own eyes—there was no need for a lantern as he bent over the parchments, etching spaces into existence. An alley here. A palais there. An island that drifted up and down the Seine. Places that could only be found if you knew to look. There were many who came searching for his workshop, who climbed up flight after flight of creaking stairs, who knocked on the mapmaker’s door to ask for a space to call their own.
Perhaps you also wish to do this?
Sorry to say, but you are too late. The mapmaker was too late too. He tried to erase the worst of his work, but places are not like pencils. They last long after the people who name them are gone. Longer even than the names themselves.