conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The Road to San Giovanni about memory, WWII, Storytelling with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Arts & Literature.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: ament by an essential 20th century writer composed of five strikingly elegant "memory exercises" about his life and work--now available in paperback. With visionary passion, the author traces pieces of his childhood and adolescence, his experiences during WWII, and more. "Storytelling at its best."--Chicago Tribune.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.. End with the sentence ' The reform that seems to be most pressing and important will be that of separating the rubbish according to its qualities and different destinies, incineration or recycling, so that at least part of what we have wrung from the treasures of the world may not be lost forever but discover the path of regeneration and re-use, the eternal return of the ephemeral.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Road to San Giovanni
  In Paris the shopping basket hangs mainly from male hands, or at least that's how it looks to an Italian used to seeing the shops in his own country mostly frequented by women, and here one gets back to appreciating how carrying food is the primary duty in home management. So that my agricultural past resurfaces now in a metropolitan context, and I recall the image of my father laden with baskets, proud to be carrying the produce of his land back home with his own hands, as a sign of his feeling that he was "master", first and foremost in the sense of "master of himself", of his self-sufficient, Robinson Crusoe independence, an independence even in respect to those paid hands whom he would resort to only for what he couldn't do with his own or with those of his ever reluctant sons.
  Is it, then, the mule track of the rejected farmer's vocation that I retrace in my memory as I walk along this street in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, between the grocer's and the baker's and the greengrocer's? No, it's another road, which I used to walk as an adolescent: the one that took me from our villa to the town, when being sent to "run errands" was a pretext for getting out of the house, and sometimes I would pretend I had forgotten something so as to be able to go out again. But more often than not I didn't even need to pretend, I was so scatterbrained and so uninterested in the real purpose of my trip, and they would have to repeat what I was supposed to buy and its weight and price over and over to get it into my head, and count out the exact money for me.
  It was a short-range Mercury who guided my steps and who still guides them today, partial reflection of the god who mediates and connects the profusion of the world, and who, unfortunately, only rarely rewards my devotion by illuminating me with his full silvery light. Or, when I am going down towards the gods of the underworld, towards the murky recesses where life's leftovers are tossed away, it's the psychopomp Mercury who walks before me, guiding my burden of dead weights down to the banks of the municipal Acheron.
  And then, we have replaced the kitchen bin too, the green one, with a new one made of white plastic which has a lid you raise and lower with a pedal and contains a bucket you can lift out. So that now it's only the bucket I carry down and empty in the big bin, or rather, not even the bucket, but the bag—again plastic—that I pull out of the bucket, replacing it with a new one. (There's an art to getting the bag to stick to the rim of the bucket, holding it so that it grips all round and won't slip down, but then you have to get out the air left underneath which lifts the bottom, blowing it out like a sail.)
  Of course these won't be the last developments in the long series of transformations our habits have undergone and will undergo as we adapt to the times, always assuming that our times themselves don't end. The reform that seems to be most pressing and important will be that of separating the rubbish according to its qualities and different destinies, incineration or recycling, so that at least part of what we have wrung from the treasures of the world may not be lost forever but discover the path of regeneration and re-use, the eternal return of the ephemeral.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Of course these won't be the last developments in the long series of transformations our habits have undergone and will undergo as we adapt to the times, always assuming that our times themselves don't end. The reform that seems to be most pressing and important will be that of separating the rubbish according to its qualities and different destinies, incineration or recycling, so that at least part of what we have wrung from the treasures of the world may not be lost forever but discover the path of regeneration and re-use, the eternal return of the ephemeral.
  One of the materials that could run out and whose salvaging is of particular concern to me, is paper, fond daughter of the forest, living space of the writing and reading man. And distinguishing and comparing the different destinies of what cooking and writing do not throw away, the products themselves, in one case something eaten, assimilated in our bodies, in the other something that, once finished, is no longer a part of me and of which it is impossible to say whether it will become food for another's reading, for a mental metabolism, or what transformations it will undergo in passing through other minds, how many of its calories it will transmit and whether it will set them in circulation again, and how. Writing, no less than throwing things away, involves dispossession, involves pushing away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper written all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited, expelled.
  So I shall begin by saying that the world is made up of broken and oblique lines, with segments that tend to protrude from the corners of each level, like the agave plants that often grow along the brink, and with vertical ascending lines like the palm trees that shade gardens and terraces above those where they are rooted,
  Obviously to describe the shape of the world the first thing to do is to establish my position, I don't mean my location but my orientation, because the world I am talking about differs from other possible worlds in this sense: that whatever the time of day or night one always knows where east and west are, and thus I shall begin by saying that I am looking southwards, which is the same as saying that I have my face towards the sea, which is the same as saying that I have my back to the mountain, because this is the position in which I usually surprise that self that dwells within myself, even when my external self is orientated in a completely different fashion or not orientated at all as is often the case, since for me every orientation starts from that initial orientation, which implies my always having the east to my left and the west to my right, and only by setting out from there can I locate myself in relation to space, and verify the properties of space and its dimensions
  So if they had asked me how many dimensions space has, if they asked that self which still does not know the things one learns so as to have a code of conventions in common with others, and first among these the convention according to which each of us stands at the meeting point of three infinite dimensions, skewered by one dimension that goes in through the chest and out from the back, by another that runs through us from shoulder to shoulder, and by a third that pierces the skull to come out from the feet, an idea one accepts only after considerable resistance and frequent rejections, but then pretends to have always known because everybody else is pretending to have always known it, if I were to answer on the basis of what I had really learnt by looking around me, about the three dimensions which with standing in the middle of them turn out to be six dimensions, in front behind above below right left, by observing them as I was saying with my face to the sea and my back to the mountain,
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about distinguishing, comparing, cooking, writing.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Of course these won't be the last developments in the long series of transformations our habits have undergone and will undergo as we adapt to the times, always assuming that our times themselves don't end. The reform that seems to be most pressing and important will be that of separating the rubbish according to its qualities and different destinies, incineration or recycling, so that at least part of what we have wrung from the treasures of the world may not be lost forever but discover the path of regeneration and re-use, the eternal return of the ephemeral. 
  One of the materials that could run out and whose salvaging is of particular concern to me, is paper, fond daughter of the forest, living space of the writing and reading man. I realize now that I should have begun this piece by distinguishing and comparing two types of domestic rubbish, cooking leftovers and writing leftovers, the rubbish bin and the wastepaper basket. And distinguishing and comparing the different destinies of what cooking and writing do not throw away, the products themselves, in one case something eaten, assimilated in our bodies, in the other something that, once finished, is no longer a part of me and of which it is impossible to say whether it will become food for another's reading, for a mental metabolism, or what transformations it will undergo in passing through other minds, how many of its calories it will transmit and whether it will set them in circulation again, and how. Writing, no less than throwing things away, involves dispossession, involves pushing away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper written all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited, expelled. 
  So I shall begin by saying that the world is made up of broken and oblique lines, with segments that tend to protrude from the corners of each level, like the agave plants that often grow along the brink, and with vertical ascending lines like the palm trees that shade gardens and terraces above those where they are rooted,
  Obviously to describe the shape of the world the first thing to do is to establish my position, I don't mean my location but my orientation, because the world I am talking about differs from other possible worlds in this sense: that whatever the time of day or night one always knows where east and west are, and thus I shall begin by saying that I am looking southwards, which is the same as saying that I have my face towards the sea, which is the same as saying that I have my back to the mountain, because this is the position in which I usually surprise that self that dwells within myself, even when my external self is orientated in a completely different fashion or not orientated at all as is often the case, since for me every orientation starts from that initial orientation, which implies my always having the east to my left and the west to my right, and only by setting out from there can I locate myself in relation to space, and verify the properties of space and its dimensions
  So if they had asked me how many dimensions space has, if they asked that self which still does not know the things one learns so as to have a code of conventions in common with others, and first among these the convention according to which each of us stands at the meeting point of three infinite dimensions, skewered by one dimension that goes in through the chest and out from the back, by another that runs through us from shoulder to shoulder, and by a third that pierces the skull to come out from the feet, an idea one accepts only after considerable resistance and frequent rejections, but then pretends to have always known because everybody else is pretending to have always known it, if I were to answer on the basis of what I had really learnt by looking around me, about the three dimensions which with standing in the middle of them turn out to be six dimensions, in front behind above below right left, by observing them as I was saying with my face to the sea and my back to the mountain,
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And even if we consider the observer immobile as at the beginning, his situation with regard to the opaque and the sunny will still be a matter for debate, since that self of mine turned to face the sunny area becomes the opaque side it sees of every bridge tree roof, while the wall or slope to which I turn my back is in full sunshine, the wall blooming with bougainvillea, the slope with its tufts of spurge, the hedge of Turkish figs, the trellis of capers
  And if departing from that initial position I consider the successive phases of that same self of mine, every step forward could just as well be a retreat, the line I trace is ever more cloaked in the opaque, and it is pointless trying to remember just where I entered the shadow, I was already there at the beginning, it is pointless searching in the depths of the opaque for an escape from the opaque, I now know that the only world that exists is the opaque the sunny being nothing more than its reverse side, the sunny that opaquely struggles to multiply itself while doing nothing more than to multiply the reverse of its own reverse
  From the opaque, from the depths of the opaque I write, reconstructing the map of a sunniness that is only an unverifiable postulate for the computations of the memory, the geometrical location of the ego, of a self which the self needs to know that it is itself, the ego whose only function is that the world may continually receive news of the existence of the world, a contrivance at the service of the world for knowing if it exists.