conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
  The first was a hare. At two thousand meters on a mountain frontier. Where are you going? asked the French customs officer. To Italy, I said. Why didn't you stop? he asked. I thought you beckoned me on, I replied. And at that moment everything was forgotten because a hare ran across the road, ten yards away from us. It was a lean hare with tufts on the tips of its ears of brown smoke. And although it was running slowly, it ran for its life. Sometimes that can happen.
  A few moments later the hare ran back across the road, this time pursued by half a dozen men, who nevertheless were running much slower than it, and who had the air of having just jumped up from a meal. The hare ran upwards towards the crags and the first patch of snow. The customs man was shouting instructions about how to catch the hare—and I drove on, over the frontier.
  The next animal was a kitten. An entirely white kitten. It belonged to a kitchen with an uneven floor, an open chimney, a wooden table that was somewhat broken, and rough whitewashed walls. Against the walls the kitten was almost invisible except for its dark eyes. When it turned its head away, it disappeared into the wall. When it jumped about over the floor or onto the table, it was like a creature that had escaped from the walls. The way that it appeared and disappeared gave it the mysterious intimacy of a household god. I have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present. As I sat at the table, the cat jumped onto my legs. It had sharp white teeth as white as its fur. And a pink tongue. Like all kittens it played continually: with its own tail, on the backs of the chairs, with scraps on the floor. When it wanted to rest, it looked for something soft to lie on. And watching it, fascinated, throughout a week, I observed that, whenever it could, it chose something white—a towel, a white pullover, some washing. Then, with eyes shut and mouth closed, curled up, it became invisible, surrounded by the white walls.
  A village in the hills, not far from Pistoia. The village cemetery was rectangular with high walls round it and wrought-iron gates. At night most of the gravestones were lit up, each with its individual candlelight. But the candles were electric, and they were switched on with the street lamps. They burnt all night and there were many more of them than street lamps in the village. Just past the cemetery, the road turned sharply and, at the bend, a dust road led off to a farm. On this dust road I saw one of the grey ducks.
  On several occasions I had seen the whole family. They often installed themselves on the grass bank under the bushes opposite the cemetery. The first time I saw the cemetery lights at dusk, I noticed the ducks waddling around in the night-green grass. A duck, a drake and about six ducklings.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The sexual thrust to reproduce and to fill the future is a thrust against the current of time which is flowing ceaselessly towards the past. The genetic information which assures reproduction works against dissipation. The sexual animal—like a grain of corn—is a conduit of the past into the future. The scale of that span over millennia, and the distance covered by that temporal short circuit which is fertilization, are such that sexuality—even for women and men—is impersonal. The message dwarfs the messenger. The impersonal force of sexuality opposes the impersonal passing of time and is antithetical to it.
  Every life is both created by, and held in, the encounter of these two opposing forces. To speak of such "holding" is another way of defining Being. What is so baffling and mysterious about Being is that it represents both stillness and movement. The stillness of an equilibrium created by the movement of two opposing forces.
  The force of sexuality is forever unfinished, is never completed. Or, rather, it finishes only to re-begin, as if for the first time.
  Differently, the ideal of love is to contain all. "Here I understand," wrote Camus, "what they call glory: the right to love without limits." This limitlessness is not passive, for the totality which love continually reclaims is precisely the totality which time appears to fragment and hide. Love is a reconstitution in the heart of that holding which is Being.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last three paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If ours were the eighteenth century, when questions opened idly like doors onto gardens, I might ask you: Do you remember? But in our century, when only evil and indifference are limitless, we cannot afford unnecessary questions; rather, we need to defend ourselves with whatever there is to hand of certainty. I know that you remember.
  The two children were playing lightly and dutifully and the notes filled the house. You were lying with your back to me, your breasts in my hands. Neither of us stirred. The music commanded a little listening and we listened—just as one can gaze at the wallpaper in a hotel room without really looking at it. Waking up to that music played lightly and dutifully by the children before going to school was the nearest we shall ever be, my heart, to waking up at home before we left.
  What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.