The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Because the enemy of wood is air, or, to be exact, the oxygen in the air, it is understandable that wood is the more endangered the greater the volume of air surrounding it: wood in thin sheets, in sticks, in shavings, in sawdust. The last, especially, is a source of risk that I hope is not overlooked in the handbook mentioned above: in part because it is widely used and is often piled up and forgotten like any other inert material. But it isn’t always inert, especially when it’s dry.

  In a factory where I worked for many years, it was common practice to use sawdust to clean the floors. We knew that it was a substance that needed to be treated with care, so we never stored it in the production area: one time we bought ten drums of sawdust and stored them outdoors, under a shed roof; it never occurred to anyone to put lids on them, because the cleaning crews frequently came out to get sawdust, and because “that was how it had always been done.”

  The drums stood there for many months, until one day a foreman came to tell me that one of the barrels was smoking. I went to see for myself: nine of the barrels were cold to the touch, the tenth was scorching hot and a sinister plume of smoke was rising from the surface of the sawdust. We dug into it with a shovel: at the center of the drum was a nest of embers and all around it the sawdust had already begun to char. If we had stored that barrel in a production area or a warehouse, the whole factory might have burned down.

  Why did one burn and the other nine not? We talked it over at length, and then, deciding to take a closer look at the surviving barrels, we noticed that the sawdust was anything but uniform: perhaps it came from different sawmills, but it was certainly made of different kinds of wood. It probably also contained extraneous materials. These factors might explain why the barrels had behaved differently, but it didn’t do much to help understand why one barrel caught fire the way it did. Then someone started talking about spontaneous combustion, and everyone felt reassured, because once you give something unknown a name you immediately have the impression that you know a little more about it.

  In any case, I went to tell the story to the fire chief at the time, a no-nonsense, practical fellow. No, he didn’t have very clear ideas about spontaneous combustion, in fact, he considered that to be a trick name, a word to cover up ignorance, not unlike what the physicians call cryptogenic fever; but he’d seen plenty of cases like ours, not all of them involving sawdust, some of them culminating in catastrophe, and all of them sharing a single unsettling trait. In each case, an apparently inert heap of material lying forgotten somewhere, in an attic, in a cellar, or in a dump, under a prompting that almost invariably remained unknown, suddenly “remembered” that it possessed energy, that it was not in a state of equilibrium with its environment, that it was, in other words, in the same condition as the billiard ball on the shelf.

  The boundaries of this fragile stability, which chemists call metastability, are far-reaching. Lying within them, alongside everything that is alive, are also virtually all organic substances, both natural and synthetic, and still other substances, all those which we can see change their state abruptly, unexpectedly: a clear sky that is secretly saturated with humidity and suddenly turns cloudy; a tranquil body of water that, at a temperature below 0 degrees Celsius, freezes in mere instants when you toss a small stone into it. But one is tempted to extend those boundaries a little farther, to include in that territory our social behaviors, our tensions, all of present-day mankind, condemned and accustomed to living in a world where everything seems stable but in fact isn’t, in which terrifying powers (and I’m not just talking about nuclear arsenals) sleep, but only lightly.

  Masters of Our Fate

  Is it permissible for someone who is unqualified, helpless, and naïve, yet not entirely unfamiliar with the evils of the world, to say a word or two in an entirely personal capacity, concerning that issue of issues—the looming nuclear threat? Recently Mondadori published the Italian edition of a fundamental, necessary, and terrifying book, The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell: after reading the book, one emerges stunned, frightened, and yet eager to act, to talk it over, or at least to think it over, which, oddly, is something we do not often do. To put it briefly: in the case of an extended nuclear war, not only will there be neither losers nor winners but the combined effects of the blasts and the subsequent radioactivity will result in the extinction, in the course of days or months, not only of the human race but of all warm-blooded animals; fish might survive a little longer; certainly insects and some plants will. What will the “privileged few” do when they emerge from their extremely expensive and sophisticated nuclear fallout shelters?

  As you can see, this is a novel situation: the experience of history, the grim wisdom from recent wars, is in no way helpful. And yet we don’t think about it, or at least we don’t think about it much; young people, apparently, think about it least of all, and, perhaps because they were born in the atomic age, they seem to accept as natural the current balance of terror, even though it offers few assurances of long-term stability. Why? For a number of reasons.

  Because we tend to repress all our sources of distress, much as we have all learned, from time immemorial, to repress our distress at our own individual death. Because we all need to focus on more pressing problems, such as world hunger, our impending fate, disease, poverty, the uncertainty of justice and employment. And also because, perhaps, at some more or less conscious level, a modest quantity of optimism persists out of the memory of all that has happened around us since the day, forty years ago, when Fermi’s atomic pile first went into operation, proving at the same time that mankind can in the future rely upon a limitless source of energy, and that the power unleashed by the transmutation of a few grams of matter can be enough to destroy two cities in a matter of seconds, and to create an incalculable measure of human suffering.

  From that day to this, over forty years of tense confrontation, cold at times, at other times less so, we have seen that even amid the most serious crises a rudimentary prudence has prevailed: just as during the Second World War poison gasses were not put into use, even though horrifying arsenals of them were available on all sides, likewise during the Cuban Missile Crisis and in the grim morass of Vietnam the opposing sides looked each other straight in the eye and didn’t push the nuclear button.

  This is hardly enough to set our minds at rest; still, there is a glaring difference between the style of politics as it has been practiced in the first and the second halves of the twentieth century. In the first half we witnessed (and how many of us contributed to!) the emergence of personalities well outside the measure of man, still poorly deciphered, such as Hitler and Stalin (in certain aspects, and in their ambitions, the same can be said perhaps of the last Kaiser and of Mussolini); they were able to exploit the press, and subsequently the new mass media, to mobilize their people emotionally, and, in the interaction with them and with one another, they unleashed the horrors of two world wars.

  Now those mass media have grown in terms of power and broad penetration, and yet, for reasons that elude us, the likelihood that uncontrollable, inhuman individuals, similar to the first two mentioned, might emerge in our midst seems to have diminished. We don’t know why, but these days the world stage seems to be occupied by gray, tentative, fleeting men, who appear and act, but are neither demonic nor charismatic: qualities that only appear to be opposites, and which are equally detestable.

  The last charismatic man was, perhaps, Mao, about whom we still know little, and whose pros and cons we cannot weigh. These new men seem chiefly concerned with preserving power for themselves and their followers. They arouse no enthusiasm, but we have learned to beware of enthusiasm: there does not appear to have formed, or to be forming, around the small-scale imitators of those models of the distant past a clot of blind, brainless, fanatical support, such as that which seemed to give power to Hitler and Stalin. The future that these new and happily modest leaders promise us (though they may perhaps be individually disposed to undertake the most despicable act
s) is no cause for exaltation, but it is not the apocalypse, which they seem to fear as much as we do, and whose “spontaneous” unleashing they also fear. Instead, it is an indefinitely protracted series of hypocritical negotiations, exhausting, largely secret, yet negotiations nonetheless: it is an interminable stalemate.

  And yet it is to these bland masters of our fate—whether they have actually, or only apparently, or by no means at all, been elected by the will of their peoples—that we have entrusted enormous powers of decision making: they and they alone are in the control rooms. It is they whom we must influence, and we must make ourselves clearly heard by them, from every corner of the world, by every means available, with all possible initiatives, even the oddest and most naïve that our imaginations can come up with.

  We don’t ask much of them: only that they try to be a little more farsighted. In spite of all our problems, we’re stronger than we’ve ever been. In the space of just a few decades we have expanded to a fabulous extent the boundaries of our knowledge, toward both the immensely large and the immensely small; soon perhaps we shall know whether, how, and when (but not why!) the universe was created. We have timidly set foot on the Moon, defeated the most horrifying pestilences, and concentrated in minuscule silicon chips astonishing “intellectual” capacities; the solutions to the challenges of energy and the population explosion are no longer utopian dreams, and we know that the degradation of our environment is not a fatal and irreversible curse.

  As a species, we’re not stupid. Shouldn’t we be able to tear down the barriers of police states, and convey from one people to another our desire for peace? Couldn’t we, for example, put on the table of our international summit conferences an old idea, inspired by the oath that Hippocrates once formulated for physicians? That every young person who intends to dedicate himself to the pursuit of physics, chemistry, or biology should swear not to undertake research and studies that are clearly harmful to the human race? It’s naïve, and I’m aware of it; many will refuse to swear that oath, many will swear falsely, but surely there are a few who will keep the faith, and the number of sorcerers’ apprentices will decline.

  It is speech that differentiates us from animals: we must learn to make good use of words. Much cruder minds than ours, thousands and millions of years ago, resolved more daunting problems. We must ensure that the murmur of voices rising from the depths is heard loud and strong, even in countries where murmuring is forbidden. It is a murmur that springs not only from fear but also from a generation’s sense of guilt. We must amplify it. We must suggest, propose, and impose a few clear and simple ideas upon the men who lead us, and they are ideas that any good merchant will understand: that agreement is the best kind of deal, and that in the long term mutual good faith is the most cunning of tricks.

  News from the Sky

  Immanuel Kant recognized two wonders in creation: the starry sky above his head, and the moral law within him. Let’s leave aside moral law: is it to be found within everyone? Is it true, can we admit that it’s innate in us, that we are born with it, and in the course of an individual life it evolves and matures, or does it, rather, degenerate and die out? Every year that passes only amplifies our doubts. In the face of the political necrosis that afflicts our nation, and not ours alone; in the face of the senseless race toward nuclear rearmament, we can hardly avoid the suspicion that there is some perverse principle that outweighs the moral law, whereby power accrues to those who are completely indifferent to this law—which we see as unchanging over time and throughout the universe, the glue that holds together all civilizations—and cannot feel its sting, who lack it and don’t seem to miss it.

  The starry sky, however, is still there: it’s overhead for one and all, even though we city dwellers see it only rarely, obscured as it is by our smog, squeezed between the roofs, defaced by television antennas. Speaking of which, let me open a parenthesis here and mention an idea I find unsettling. Unlike radio waves, the waves used to broadcast television aren’t reflected back to Earth by the upper atmosphere: they are not contained within our earthly shell, they are no longer our private affair. The visible bandwidth of light—for instance, nighttime city street lighting—behaves in the same way, but those waves contain practically no information. Television waves, in contrast, are rich in information; they penetrate the ionosphere and escape into cosmic space. Earth, on those wavelengths, is “luminous,” it’s talkative. A perceptive extraterrestrial observer, properly equipped and curious about our lives, could learn quite a bit about our collapsing governments, our laundry detergents, our aperitifs, and the diapers we use for babies. Such an observer would get a peculiar picture of the way we live.

  But let’s return to the starry sky. When we glimpse it on clear nights, from a vantage point far from the interference of our own lighting, it’s still the same: its fascination hasn’t altered. The “shimmering stars of the Bear”1 are the same stars that restored Leopardi’s sense of peace, the W of Cassiopeia, the cross of Cygnus, Orion the giant, the triangle of Boötes flanked by the Corona Borealis and the Pleiades that Sappho loved so well: these are all still the same; we learned to recognize them as children and they have been with us throughout our lives. It is the heaven “of the fixed stars,” immutable, incorruptible; the antagonist to our earthly world, the noble-perfect-eternal that embraces and envelops the ignoble-changeable-ephemeral.

  And yet we no longer have the right to look at the stars this way, in such a naïve and simplistic manner. The human sky is no longer what it was. We’ve learned to explore it with radio telescopes, we know how to send instruments into orbit that can detect the radiation that the atmosphere blocks, and we are obliged to realize that the stars visible to our eyes, whether naked or assisted, are no more than a tiny minority; the sky is being rapidly populated with a throng of new and unsuspected objects.

  A hundred years ago, the universe was purely “optical”; it wasn’t especially mysterious, and we believed it would become less and less so. We saw it as friendly and familiar: every star was a sun like ours, larger or smaller, warmer or cooler, but not fundamentally different; a few of the stars did seem to be somewhat unsettled, and here and there new ones had appeared, but everything suggested that the design of the universe was the same everywhere. Spectroscopes sent back reassuring messages: nothing to be afraid of, the stars were made up of hydrogen, helium, magnesium, sodium, and iron, the basic materials of Earth chemistry.

  It was thought likely that every star-sun had its own entourage of planets: some astronomers (first among them Camille Flammarion, the eager and tireless popularizer) even asserted that each star had to have one, otherwise it would have no reason to exist. Indeed, every planet, including those orbiting our sun, had to be an abode of life, or to have once been one, or destined to be one in the future: excessively sharpeyed observers saw fleeting lights and smoke on the Moon, and on Mars networks of canals too orderly and geometric to be the product of nature unaided. A universe inhabited by us alone, imperfect as we are, would be nothing but an immense and useless piece of machinery.

  Now the sky that hangs over our heads is no longer familiar. It is becoming increasingly intricate, unpredictable, violent, and strange; its mystery grows instead of dwindling, and every discovery, every answer to old questions engenders myriad new questions. Copernicus and Galileo shoved mankind out of the center of creation: that was only a change of address, though many experienced it as a demotion and a humiliation. Today our awareness extends much further: we see that the imagination of the creator of the universe does not respect our own boundaries, indeed, it has no boundaries, and our astonishment, too, becomes boundless. Not only are we not the center of the cosmos but we are alien to it: we are a singularity. The universe is strange to us, and we are strange within the universe.

  Generations of lovers and poets have gazed upon the stars with confidence, as if upon familiar faces: they were friendly symbols, reassuring, dispensers of destinies, obligatory presences in both popular and subl
ime poetry; Dante ended each of the three canticles of his poem with the word “stars.” The stars of today, both visible and invisible, have changed their nature. They are atomic furnaces. They transmit not messages of peace or of poetry but other messages, ponderous and unsettling, decipherable by only a few initiates, controversial, alien.

  The directory of celestial monsters is virtually endless: our everyday language fails at description, unsuited to the task. There are “small” stars that are unimaginably dense, rotating dozens of times per second, shooting out into space a babble of radio waves intended for no one and devoid of meaning: they have always done this, and they always will. There are stars that emit energy at an intensity greater than the output of our entire galaxy, so far away that we see them as they must have looked at the dawn of time. There are others no hotter than a cup of tea; and, finally, the much discussed black holes, so far more the product of speculation than of observation—supposed celestial graves and sinkholes, whose gravitational fields are thought to be so intense that neither matter nor radiation can escape them.

  The scientist and poet has not yet been born—and perhaps never will be—who might be capable of extracting harmony from this tangled darkness, of making it compatible with, comparable to, assimilable by our traditional culture and the experience of our five paltry senses, designed to guide us within terrestrial horizons. This news from heaven poses a challenge to our reason.

  It is a challenge that we must accept. Our nobility as thinking reeds demands it: perhaps the heavens are no longer part of our poetic heritage, but they will be—indeed, already are—vital nutrition for our thoughts. It’s possible that our brain is unique in the universe: we don’t know if that’s true, nor in all likelihood will we ever, but we do know that it’s something more complex and harder to describe than a star or a planet. Let us not deny it nourishment, let us not give in to panic at the thought of the unknown. Perhaps it will fall to those who study the stars to tell us what prophets and philosophers have failed to tell us, or have told us badly: who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going.