The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

"There have been courtier philosophers, lens-grinding philosophers, and even engineer and strategist philosophers; but no philosopher, so far as I know, was a wholesaler." - Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, "Arsenic"

I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but there are genre I think I like, that, whenever I actually read them, I remember that I don't (Southern Gothic comes to mind). Likewise, there are genre that I repeatedly forget that I adore. Like scientific memoir.

"Promethius had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture." - "Cerium"

The Periodic Table (1975) is one of several volumes of memoir Primo Levi wrote, but, where the other works focus on the time during and immediately following his internment at Auschwitz, this one describes his life in vignettes related to his chemistry training and career. The chapters are named for and themed around chemical elements (Iron, Mercury, Sulfur) - thus the title. To the extent that chemistry is addressed as such, there's nothing scientifically academic about the work, and, though a reader with no chemistry background might not fully understand some of the activities described, that shouldn't make it inaccessible, as every Levi pulls every detail to serve the humanity of the story.

Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptable, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptable things. - "Cerium"

Certainly, as a quasi-chemist (a chemical engineer, actually, but I have to pass for a chemist occasionally) with a literary bent, I love to get this view of someone like Levi, but the fascination of this perspective goes deeper than shared education. Levi is the object of any number of descriptors: novelist, essayist, critic, resistance fighter, Holocaust survivior. But, and this is what's so fascinating, what was his main occupation, for most of his work days, for most of his life? The trade he chose in his youth to pursue? Chemist. And not a chemist like Levoisier, or Linus Pauling, or Peter Debye, people who discovered groundbreaking phenomena or won Nobel Prizes or got obscure units of measure named for them. Levi was an industrial chemist - mostly, he solved problems in paint formulations when the product wouldn't dry properly.

Better to remain on the Earth, playing with the dipoles... - "Potassium"

I find this incredibly inspiring. Modern popular philosophies of fulfilment suggest that actualized existence can only occur when one aligns the maximum possible number of daily hours with the most rarefied calling to which one can attain. In other words, you can get life to work, if only you demand the freedom to live in unreality. It's good to be reminded that ordinary usefulness doesn't preclude greatness.

Now on my cubicle wall: To be a consultant is the ideal work, the sort from which you derive prestige and money without dirtying your hands, or breaking your backbone, or running the risk of ending up roasted or poisoned: all you have to do is take off your smock, put on your tie, listen in attentive silence to the problem, and then you'll feel like the Delphic oracle. You must then weigh your reply very carefully and formulate it in convoluted, vague language so that the customer also considers you an oracle, worthy of his faith and the rates set by the Chemists' Society. - "Nitrogen"

Additional Quotes

On the trade:

• ...all the values satisfied the specification, indeed were equal among themselves: 29.5 percent, not one percent more, not one less. I felt my inner being as a chemist writhe, confronted with this abomination. - "Chromium"
  
  
• The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. - "Nitrogen"
  
  
• I must also mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of [customer service]: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a few years in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone who feigns madness for a long time actually becomes crazy. - "Uranium"
  
  
• I was more interested in the stories of the solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine. - "Silver"
  
  
• I also know that, more often mania prevails over common sense, and alongside five sensible precepts or prohibitions lurk ten senseless, useless ones, which nobody dares rescind only out of mental laziness, superstition, or morbid fear of complications. - "Silver"

On the war:

• We thought what all humiliated Italians were then thinking: that the Germans and Japanese were invincible, but the Americans were too, and that the war would plod on like this for another twenty or thirty years, a bloody and interminable but remote stalemate, known only through doctored war bulletins... - "Gold"
  
  
• Neither in us nor, more generally, in our generation, whether "Aryan" or Jew, had the idea yet gained ground that one must or could resist Fascism. - "Potassium"
  
  
• During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly... - "Gold"

On rabbits:

• Rabbits are not attractive animals. They are among the mammals most distant from man, perhaps because their qualities are those of humanity when humiliated and outcast: they are timid, silent, and evasive, and all they know is food and sex. - "Phosphorus"
  
  
• Those rabbits, by order of the commendatore, lived each in its own cage, males and females, in strict celibacy. But there was a night bombing which, without causing any other damages, bashed all the cages, and in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation: the bombs had not frightened them at all. - "Phosphorus"

On humanity:

• ...man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. - "Argon"
  
  
• He had studied medicine and had become a good doctor, but he did not like the world. - "Argon"
  
  
• In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. - "Hydrogen"
  
  
• ...we were at the age when one always has the need, instinct, and immodesty of inflicting on one another everything that swarms in one's head and elsewhere (and this is an age that can last long, but ends with the first compromise) - "Iron"
  
  
• That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves... - "Iron"
  
  
• Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page. - "Iron"