conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere about Boston, Globe with the genre: Travel, Europe.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "The best story written in the 21st century." --  The Boston Globe , 10/11/2006
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere
  When in 1872, in his fifty-first year, Her Majesty's Foreign Office chose Burton to represent Queen Victoria in this respectable seaport he was affronted and dismayed. He thought Trieste preposterously unworthy of him. His ideal foreign country was "a haggard land infested with wild beasts and wilder men, a region whose very fountains murmur the warning words 'Drink and away!'" With his total command of Arabic and his profound knowledge of the Muslim world, he had expected the Consulate-General in Damascus, or at least Tangier. Instead he was shunted off to a place he considered a third-rate middle-class backwater on the edge of a hide-bound empire, where only the polyglot hubbub of the docks could speak to him of romance.
  The inn is still there, but derelict, with swinging shutters and broken doors and overgrown terraces. Around the side of it, down a basement tunnel, there is a plaque on an inner wall with a relief of Sir Richard, and an inscription recording the improbable fact that in this building he opened the eyes of the western world to the full glory of the Arabian Nights. I like to loiter around the place, looking down to the wide blue bay beyond the city, hearing the distant buzz of its traffic and the whistle of the wind through the pines, and thinking of the formidable old exile labouring away inside, seedy, proud and resentful, while he wrote of the flying horses, the harems, the wizards and the Caliphs of his other world.
  FOR MOST of its exiles Trieste was not a bad place to be, after all, if only because a web of fellow-feeling united you with your peers. Ex-kings bowed to discarded princes, landless aristocrats visited each other's salons, even Burton doubtless found himself a few congenial idiosyncrats. And James Joyce, reading a manuscript by the shy young businessman who wrote as Italo Svevo, recognised it at once as the work of a fellow-artist—living there in metaphorical banishment, like himself, among the clerks and the accountants.
  But of course it was Jews that the passage of those trains along the waterfront always brought to my mind. Even now, when I see in memory's eye a last dingy wagon of the 19£os, trundling away towards the old fish market, I see too the lights of more dreadful trains disappearing into the eastern forests on their way to Auschwitz. In my mind Jews and Trieste go together, and the long and fruitful association of the two has made the city what it is—or at least, what it seems to me to be in those moments, ten minutes before the hour, when the idea of it bewitches me. In Habsburg times people in Vienna considered Trieste a Jewish city, and in a way I still do.
  They say that you can take a Jew out of exile, but you can never take exile out of a Jew. Actually, for a hundred and fifty years the Jewish diaspora in Trieste was for the most part happy and successful. In many ways Jews did set the style of the place. They were encouraged to settle here from the first years of its Habsburgian expansion, under Maria Theresa. They had already proved their cosmopolitan value in the development of other European ports—Livorno, London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Bordeaux: in this brand-new mercantile enterprise, on the edge of a continental empire, they would be especially useful. Generous privilege induced them to come: freedom from restrictions imposed upon Jews elsewhere in the empire, exemption from military service, guaranteed freedom of worship and investment. Rich and educated Jews were undoubtedly preferred.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: IN THOSE days this narrow countryside seemed to me instinct with subterfuge. As a lifelong aspirant anarchist I have always been attracted by the idea of a life of crime (feebly sublimating the instinct by taking face flannels from expensive hotels, to use as handkerchiefs), and there were taverns of the Karst then where the fancy seemed exhilaratingly real. How enjoyable to sit in some tumbled courtyard, high on the flinty plateau, eating home-cured ham and drinking chilled wine from the vineyard next door, while planning if only in the imagination escapades of bloodless villainy—smuggling spirits out of Bosnia, say, or robbing the downtown Banca d'ltalia! How piquant to spend an evening in a crowded noisy inn somewhere near that froward frontier, trellised, trestle-tabled, jam-packed, with waiters dashing madly in all directions and jolly groups of friends drinking beer, and thinking that all around me conspiracies might be flourishing or double agents practising their deceptions!
  Today the excitement has gone, and there are no sinister delays at the borders. Even so, sometimes I feel a tremor of the undercover still. Only the other day I stopped for an early breakfast at a cafe a mile or two from one of the frontier crossings, and there I got into conversation with a Dutch lorry-driver. He told me he had been delivering a load of tomatoes in Zagreb, and was on his way back to Amsterdam. It was his own truck, he said. He drove it all over eastern Europe, delivering one thing and another, picking up this and that for transport to the west. He seemed relieved to be over the border, though, and even as he mentioned the random nature of his commerce, I wondered if he had Chinese, Turks or indigent Romanys hidden silent in his trailer as he drank his coffee and prepared to move on.
  EVIL memories of war linger in the Karst. Romans and Turks fought in their time up here, and there were terrible confrontations between Italians and Austrians in the first world war—down by the coast, the Wolves of Tuscany, two snarling animals of bronze, represent one of their most famous battles, when two unconquerable Italian battalions defied the worst the Austrian army could do to them. Many a village war memorial—very likely no more than a chunk of pocked and pitted limestone—remembers the men of these parts who fought with Tito's partisans, and near Basovizza, only a mile or two from the Slovenian frontier, there is a horrible reminder that in the wars of the Karst, as in all others, many victims get no memorial at all.
  These people have been hardened by history and by climate, but they have been moulded by geology too—it is a population perfectly attuned to its landscape. The Karst is not all forbidding. It can be welcoming too, a place of butterflies, lizards and cats in the shrubbery. In some of its pot-holes pigeons live, and one can see them lurking in the shadows down there, suddenly flying around for a moment or two, or reproachfully flapping their wings. Others have been filled with water down the ages, and are hidden away in glades of oak or ash, perfectly circular and alive with fish and dragon-flies. Sometimes reeds wave languidly at their edges, and small golden carp swim through, or big green newts hang head-down from rush-stalks.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It was a grand foretaste, I thought, of vitalities to come—or an echo of vigours past. Yet even as I watched, the Trieste effect intervened, like a migraine that clouds the vision, and in my dreaming eye I saw the whole bay empty and brooding again, and the castle all alone out there, and the float never bobbing on that fisherman's line.
  There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.
  And the fondness of Trieste people for their city's innumerable half-feral cats always touches me. Old ladies emerge from their houses with scrunched-up bags of pasta, looking for favourite strays to feed. Outside the Trattoria Risorto in Mug-gia, while the Mayor took his victuals inside, I once counted eleven happy cats arriving with every sign of familiarity for their daily rations. On the Karst I discovered a little nest of cats, dappled and half-hidden by foliage, surrounded by the mess of spaghetti and fish-heads brought there every day by solicitous neighbours. In Trieste animals are rarely scared of humans, to my mind a sure sign of civic integrity, come wealth or poverty, fame or ignominy, empire or dictatorship or Autonomous Region.
  As we used to say at the cinema, in the days of continuous programming, this is where we came in. The clock-hand moves. The angel has passed, and the talk resumes in slight embarrassment. "Well now, yes, mm, what were we saying? Care for another glass... ?"
  As for me, when my clock moves on for the last time, the angel having returned to Heaven, the angler having packed it in for the night and gone to the pub, I shall happily haunt the two places that have most happily haunted me. Most of the after-time I shall be wandering with my beloved along the banks of the Dwyfor: but now and then you may find me in a boat below the walls of Miramar, watching the nightingales swarm.