conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Zeno, Ada, Augusta entitled Zeno's Conscience?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Zeno's Conscience: The novel is presented as a diary written by Zeno (who claims that it is full of lies), published by his doctor.\nThe doctor has left a little note in the beginning, saying he had Zeno write an autobiography to help him in his psychoanalysis.\nThe doctor has published the work as revenge for Zeno discontinuing his visits.\nThe diary, however, does not follow the chronological order; instead, it is structured in large chapters, each one developing a particular theme (The smoke addiction, My father\'s death, History of my marriage and so on).\nOnly the last chapter is a real diary, with pages related to single dates in the period of the First World War.\nZeno first writes about his cigarette addiction and cites the first times he smoked.\nIn his first few paragraphs, he remembers his life as a child.\nOne of his friends bought cigarettes for his brother and him.\nSoon, he steals money from his father to buy tobacco, but finally decides not to do this out of shame.\nEventually, he starts to smoke his father\'s half-smoked cigars instead.\nThe problem with his "last cigarette" starts when he is twenty.\nHe contracts a fever and his doctor tells him that to heal he must abstain from smoking.\nHe decides smoking is bad for him and smokes his "last cigarette" so he can quit.\nHowever, this is not his last and he soon becomes plagued with "last cigarettes".\nHe attempts to quit on days of important events in his life and soon obsessively attempts to quit on the basis of the harmony in the numbers of dates.\nEach time, the cigarette fails to truly be the last.\nHe goes to doctors and asks friends to help him give up the habit, but to no avail.\nHe even commits himself into a clinic, but escapes.\nThe whole theme, while objectively serious, is often treated in a humorous way.\nWhen Zeno reaches middle age, his father\'s health begins to deteriorate.\nHe starts to live closer to his father in case he passes away.\nZeno is very different from his father, who is a serious man, while Zeno likes to joke.\nFor instance, when his father states that Zeno is crazy, Zeno goes to the doctor and gets an official certification that he is sane.\nHe shows this to his father who is hurt by this joke and becomes even more convinced that Zeno must be crazy.\nHis father is also afraid of death, being very uncomfortable with the drafting of his will.\nOne night, his father falls gravely ill and loses consciousness.\nThe doctor comes and works on the patient, who is brought out of the clutches of death momentarily.\nOver the next few days, his father is able to get up and regains a bit of his self.\nHe is restless and shifts positions for comfort often, even though the doctor says that staying in bed would be good for his circulation.\nOne night, as his father tries to roll out of bed, Zeno blocks him from moving, to do as the doctor wished.\nHis angry father then stands up and accidentally slaps Zeno in the face before dying.\nHis memoirs then trace how he meets his wife.\nWhen he is starting to learn about the business world, he meets his future father-in-law Giovanni Malfenti, an intelligent and successful businessman, whom Zeno admires.\nMalfenti has four daughters, Ada, Augusta, Alberta, and Anna, and when Zeno meets them, he decides that he wants to court Ada because of her beauty and since Alberta is quite young, while he regards Augusta as too plain, and Anna is only a little girl.\nHe is unsuccessful and the Malfentis think that he is actually trying to court Augusta, who had fallen in love with him.\nHe soon meets his rival for Ada\'s love, who is Guido Speier.\nGuido speaks perfect Tuscan (while Zeno speaks the dialect of Trieste), is handsome, and has a full head of hair (compared with Zeno\'s bald head).\nThat evening, while Guido and Zeno both visit the Malfentis, Zeno proposes to Ada and she rejects him for Guido.\nZeno then proposes to Alberta, who is not interested in marrying, and he is rejected by her also.\nFinally, he proposes to Augusta (who knows that Zeno first proposed to the other two) and she accepts, because she loves him.\nVery soon, the couples get married and Zeno starts to realize that he can love Augusta.\nThis surprises him as his love for her does not diminish.\nHowever, he meets Carla, a poor aspiring singer, and they start an affair, with Carla thinking that Zeno does not love his wife.\nMeanwhile, Ada and Guido marry and mr Malfenti gets sick.\nZeno\'s affection for both Augusta and Carla increases and he has a daughter named Antonia around the time Giovanni passes away.\nFinally, one day, Carla expresses a sudden whim to see Augusta.\nZeno deceives Carla and causes her to meet Ada instead.\nCarla misrepresents Ada as Zeno\'s wife, and moved by her beauty and sadness, breaks off the affair.\nZeno goes on to relate the business partnership between him and Guido.\nThe two men set up a merchant business together in Trieste.\nThey hire two workers named Luciano and Carmen (who becomes Guido\'s mistress) and they attempt to make as much profit as possible.\nHowever, due to Guido\'s obsession with debts and credit as well as with the notion of profit, the company does poorly.\nGuido and Ada\'s marriage begins to crumble as does Ada\'s health and beauty.\nGuido fakes a suicide attempt to gain Ada\'s compassion and she asks Zeno to help Guido\'s failing company.\nGuido starts playing on the Bourse (stock exchange) and loses even more money.\nOn a fishing trip, he asks Zeno about the differences in effects between sodium veronal and veronal and Zeno answers that sodium veronal is fatal while veronal is not.\nGuido\'s gambling on the Bourse becomes very destructive and he finally tries to fake another suicide to gain Ada\'s compassion.\nHowever, he takes a fatal amount of veronal and dies.\nSoon thereafter, Zeno misses Guido\'s funeral because he himself gambles Guido\'s money on the Bourse and recovers three quarters of the losses.\nZeno describes his current life.\nIt is during the Great War and his daughter Antonia (who greatly resembles Ada) and son Alfio have grown up.\nHe spends his time visiting doctors, looking for a cure to his imagined sickness.\nOne of the doctors claims he is suffering from the Oedipus complex, but Zeno does not believe it to be true.\nNot a single doctor is able to treat him.\nIn May 1915 – Italy is still neutral, as Zeno wants it to be – Zeno and his family spend a vacation on the green banks of the Isonzo.\nZeno does not yet guess that area will soon become a major battlefield.\nRenting a house in the village of Lucinico, Zeno sets out on a casual morning stroll without his hat and jacket – when the outbreak of the war between Italy and Austro-Hungary turns the area into a war zone and Zeno is separated from his wife and children by the frontline.\nHe must go back alone to Trieste, only much later finding that Augusta and the children reached Turin safely.\nThe final entry is written in March 1916, when Zeno – left alone in wartime Trieste – had made much money out of speculation and hoarding, but it did not make him feel happy or pleased with life.\nHe comes to a realization that life itself resembles sickness because it has advancements and setbacks and always ends in death.\nHuman advancement has given mankind not more able bodies, but weapons that can be sold, bought, stolen to prolong life.\nThis deviation from natural selection causes more sickness and weakness in humans.\nZeno imagines a time when a person will invent a new, powerful weapon of mass destruction and another will steal it and destroy the world, setting it free of sickness.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first three paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Zeno's Conscience
  Here her health failed to triumph, and she had to renounce museums. I told her that once, at the Louvre, I became so confused in the midst of all those works of art that I was about to smash the Venus to bits.
  With resignation, Augusta said: "Thank goodness museums are something you do on your honeymoon, then never again!"
  In fact, in real life we lack the monotony of museums. Days go by, suitable for framing; they are rich in sounds that daze you, and besides their lines and colors, they are also filled with real light, the kind that burns and therefore isn't boring.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Therefore I was not allowed to preach morality to her, and it was too bad for me. In preaching morality to her I would surely have arrived at a higher level of sincerity, perhaps attempting again to take her into my arms. I would not torment myself any more for having wanted to play that false role of Mentor.
  There was never anything between me and Carmen. Quite soon I felt an absolute indifference toward her, as if she had changed sex, something similar to what I felt for Ada. A keen sympathy for both, and nothing more. That was it!
  Guido showered me with kindnesses. I believe that in that month when I had left him alone, he had learned to value my company. A girl like Carmen can be pleasant from time to time, but you can't really bear her for whole days. He invited me hunting and fishing. I detest hunting, and firmly refused to accompany him. But one evening, driven by boredom, I did end up going fishing with him. A fish lacks any means of communicating with us, and cannot arouse our compassion. He gasps even when he's safe and sound in the water! Death itself doesn't alter his appearance. His suffering, if it exists, is perfectly concealed beneath his scales.
  One day, when Guido had invited me to go fishing in the evening, I put off my decision until I could see if Augusta would allow me to stay out so late that night. I told him I wouldn't forget that his boat would be casting off from the Sartorio dock at 9:00 p.m. and, if it was possible, I'd be there. So I assumed he, too, would immediately know he wouldn't see me that evening and, as I had done so many other times, I would fail to turn up at the appointed hour.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Naturally I am not ingenuous, and I forgive the doctor for seeing life itself as a manifestation of sickness. Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn't tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated.
  Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain... in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of space? Merely thinking of it, I am suffocated!
  Any effort to give us health is vain. It can belong only to the animal who knows a sole progress, that of his own organism. When the swallow realized that for her no other life was possible except migration, she strengthened the muscle that moves her wings, and it then became the most substantial part of her organism. The mole buried herself, and her whole body adapted to her need. The horse grew and transformed his hoof. We don't know the process of some animals, but it must have occurred and it will never have undermined their health.
  But bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside of his body, and if health and nobility existed in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. Devices are bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. His first devices seemed extensions of his arm and couldn't be effective without its strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all earth, the creator. The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection. We would need much more than psychoanalysis. Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick will flourish.
  Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn't tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated.
  Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain... in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of space? Merely thinking of it, I am suffocated!
  Any effort to give us health is vain. It can belong only to the animal who knows a sole progress, that of his own organism. When the swallow realized that for her no other life was possible except migration, she strengthened the muscle that moves her wings, and it then became the most substantial part of her organism. The mole buried herself, and her whole body adapted to her need. The horse grew and transformed his hoof. We don't know the process of some animals, but it must have occurred and it will never have undermined their health.
  But bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside of his body, and if health and nobility existed in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. Devices are bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. His first devices seemed extensions of his arm and couldn't be effective without its strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all earth, the creator. The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection. We would need much more than psychoanalysis. Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick will flourish.
  Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.