We are thus confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next: geographical, economic, sociological, ecological, political, (...) the space of energy flows.

(...), all the outcomes in fact occur; each is the starting point for further bifurcations. Once in a while, the paths of that labyrinth converge.

A new ‘life experience’ is in the air, a perception of life that explodes the form of the linear-centred narrative (...) we seem to be haunted by the chanciness of life and the alternate versions of reality.

The very incoherence of this city is due, paradoxically, to its adequacy as an image of the universe; time, permitting every possibility, demands a narrative where every option is maintained, and where no single plot determines the course of events. For time is the possibility of possibilities.

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes - "with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other," says Billy Pilgrim.

Events do not unfold with the flow of time, but present themselves complete and in this total picture, movements backward and forward in time are as usual as movements backward and forward in space.

To accept this scar is to accept existence. Healing is not an illusory, cosmetic process, but something that -by articulating differences- both deeply divides and joins together.

All houses in the city are joined. Houses of sod - high mountain Mongols blink in smoky doorways - houses of bamboo and teak, houses of adobe, stone and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred feet long sheltering entire tribes, houses of boxes and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotten rags cooking down canned heat, great rusty iron racks rising two hundred feet in the air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multi leveled platforms, and hammocks swinging over the void.

Imagine all the world's mountains assembled in one place. The result would be akin to a huge metropolis, with giant skyscrapers jostling for space. If we think of architecture on a mountain scale, then a city like this would likely resemble a mountain range.