by Primo Levi
The future of mankind is uncertain, even in the more prosperous nations, and the quality of life is declining; all the same, I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and the infinitely small is enough to absolve this end of the century and the millennium. What a very few are boldly achieving in terms of our understanding of the physical world will ensure that this period is judged as something more than a return to barbarism.
1. From Leopardi’s poem “Le ricordanze” (“The Recollections”).
Beetles
It is said that the famous British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, back in the days when he was a firm believer in Marxism (that is to say, before the Lysenko scandal undermined many of his certainties), replied to a churchman who asked to know his conception of God: “He is inordinately fond of beetles.” I would guess that Haldane, when he used the generic term “beetles,” was referring to coleoptera, and in this case we can certainly agree with him: for reasons that we don’t really understand, this “model” alone, albeit within the remarkably multiform class of insects, numbers at least 350,000 officially catalogued species, and new species are being discovered every day. Since there are many environments and parts of the world that have not yet been explored by specialists, it is estimated that there are currently one and a half million species of coleoptera. Now, we mammals, so proud of our role as the crown of creation, number no more than 5000 species; it is unlikely that many more than a few dozen new species will be discovered, while many of the existing ones are rapidly reaching extinction.
And yet the coleoptera’s invention doesn’t seem so innovative after all: it consists “only” of changing the purpose of the forward pair of wings. They are no longer wings but “elytra”: they are hardened and thickened, and their only function is to protect the rear wings, which are membranous and delicate. If you think of the meticulous ceremony with which a ladybug or a May bug prepares for flight, and you compare it with the instantaneous and directional takeoff of the fly, you will easily see that for most coleoptera flight is not a way of escaping attack but, rather, a method of transport that the insect resorts to only for long journeys: a bit like one of us who, when taking a plane, puts up with the purchase of the ticket, the process of check-in, and the lengthy wait in the airport. A ladybug opens its elytra, fiddles around to untangle its wings, finally spreads them, lifts the elytra obliquely, and begins its flight, neither agile nor fast. We must conclude, it seems, that there is a high price to be paid for solid armor.
But the armor of the coleoptera is an admirable structure: to be admired, unfortunately, only in the vitrines of zoological museums. It is a masterpiece of natural engineering, reminiscent of the suits of armor, made entirely of iron, worn by medieval warriors. There are no chinks: head, neck, thorax, and abdomen, although they are not welded together, form a stout block that is virtually invulnerable, the fragile antennae can be retracted into channels, and even the leg joints are protected by jutting segments reminiscent of the greaves in the Iliad. The resemblance between a beetle pushing its way through the grass, slow and powerful, and a tank is so great that a metaphor comes immediately to mind, working in both directions: the insect is a tiny panzer tank, the panzer tank is an enormous insect. And the beetle’s back is heraldic: convex or flat, opaque or glistening, it is an aristocratic coat of arms, though its appearance has no symbolic relationship with its owner’s “calling”—that is, the way it eludes its predators, reproduces, and feeds.
It is here that the Almighty’s “fondness” for beetles unleashes its full imagination. There is no organic material on Earth, living or dead or decomposed, that hasn’t found a fan among the coleoptera. Many beetles are omnivorous, others feed only at the expense of a single plant or animal species. There are beetles that eat only snails and have transformed themselves into an ideal tool for that purpose: they have become living syringes, with a voluminous abdomen but a head and thorax that are elongated and penetrating in shape. They insert themselves into the soft body of their victim, inject digestive fluids into it, wait for the tissues to break down, and then suck them out.
The beautiful cetoniae (so beloved of Gozzano: “Disperate cetonie capovolte”—“Desperate upside-down cetoniae”—one of the loveliest lines of poetry ever composed in Italian) feed only on roses, while the no less beautiful sacred beetles live exclusively on cattle dung: the male beetle shapes the dung into a ball, seizes it between his hind tarsi as if between two hinges, then moves off in reverse, pushing it and rolling it until he finds suitable soil in which to bury it: then the female enters the scene and lays a single egg in it. The larva will feed on this material (no longer ignoble) that the foresightful couple has assembled with such great effort, and, after the larva molts, a new beetle will emerge from the tomb: indeed, according to certain ancient observers, the same insect as before, risen from death like the Phoenix.
Other beetles live in sluggish or stagnant water. They are magnificent swimmers: some, for unknown reasons, swim in tight circles or complicated spirals, while others move in straight lines in pursuit of invisible prey. None of them have lost the ability to fly, though, because they are frequently forced to abandon a pond that has dried up and search for another body of still water, maybe a considerable distance away. Once, driving at night on a moonlit highway, I heard the windows and roof of my car being peppered as if by hail: it was a swarm of diving beetles, shiny, dark brown edged with orange, each half the size of a walnut; they had mistaken the asphalt of the highway for a river and were unsuccessfully trying to set down on the water. These beetles, for hydrodynamic reasons, have attained a compactness and simplicity of shape I believe is unique in the animal kingdom: seen from above, they are perfect ellipses, from which only the legs protrude, transformed into oars.
When it comes to escaping dangers and predators, these insects “think of everything.” Some exotic species, no bigger than a fava bean, are endowed with unbelievable muscular strength. Grasp one in your hand and it will force its way out between your fingers; if swallowed by a toad (a mistake! though a toad will swallow any small object it sees moving horizontally), it will not follow the tactics of Jonah swallowed by the whale or Pinocchio and Geppetto in the belly of the Terrible Dogfish, but, with the strength of its forelegs, meant for burrowing, will simply dig an exit through the body of the predator.
Other singular escapes are those of the Elateridae, or click beetles, handsome local beetles with elongated bodies. If picked up, or disturbed in any other way, they will fold up legs and antennae and play dead; but after a minute or two you’ll hear a sudden click, and the insect will shoot into the air. This brief jump, meant to disorient an attacker, does not rely on the legs: the click beetle has come up with a novel system of tension and release. In the position in which it plays dead, thorax and abdomen are out of alignment, forming a slight angle: they suddenly straighten when a sort of latch is released, and the click beetle is gone.
The cool light of the firefly (it, too, is a beetle) is not designed for defense; instead it serves to facilitate mating. This, likewise, is an invention unparalleled among animals that live out of water; but there are super-fireflies of other species, whose females imitate the steady light of the female firefly, thus attracting male fireflies and gobbling them up as soon as they set down next to them.
These behaviors trigger a complicated array of impressions: astonishment, curiosity, admiration, horror, hilarity. But it seems to me that what prevails over all is a sensation of strangeness: these little flying fortresses, these small but prodigious machines whose instincts were programmed a hundred million years ago, have nothing in common with us, and they represent a totally different approach to the problem of survival. To some extent, or even just symbolically, we humans recognize ourselves in the social structures of ants and bees, in the industriousness of the spider, and in the dance of the butterfly. But there is really nothing linking us to beetles, not even parental care, since it is exceedingly rare for a mother beetle (and
even rarer for a father beetle) to see its offspring before dying. They are other, aliens, monsters. Kafka knew what he was doing in his atrocious hallucination, where the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, “waking one morning from uneasy dreams,” finds he has been changed into an enormous beetle, so inhuman that no member of his family can tolerate his presence.
Let it be said, then: these “others” have shown admirable abilities to adapt to all climates, they have colonized all the ecological niches, and they eat everything: some even punch their way through lead and tinfoil. They have developed armor that has an extraordinary resistance to shocks, compression, chemical agents, and radiation. Some of them dig burrows that extend meters deep into the ground. If there were to be a nuclear catastrophe, they would be the leading candidates to succeed us (not the dung beetles, though; they would lack raw materials to feed on).
Above all, their technology is ingenious but rudimentary and instinctive; from the day they take over the world, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly beloved of God completes his calculations and finds, written on a piece of paper in letters of fire, that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. The new kings of the planet will live long and peacefully, doing no more than devouring and parasitizing one another on an artisanal scale.
Ritual and Laughter
There are those who write in order to astonish, and, indeed, there have been times when striking wonder into the reader was considered to be the chief objective of the writer’s profession: but the book that most astonished me, and which I happened upon by chance, was certainly never written with that aim. It is a book with a religious subject, or, to be precise, a ritual subject, and I am not a religious person; but I’m not going to comment on the book with any critical intent, because I respect believers and sometimes envy them. Its peculiarities made me reflect: they brought me back to a way of thinking about life and the world that is far from our own, but which we ought to understand if we hope to understand ourselves, and which it would be foolish to dismiss with scorn.
The book is called the Shulchan Aruch (The Set Table); it was written in Hebrew (though I read it in translation) in the sixteenth century by a Spanish rabbi. Although it is a book of considerable heft, it is a compendium of many preceding volumes, and it basically contains the rules, the customs, and the beliefs of the Judaism of its time. It is divided into four sections that concern, respectively: precepts for everyday life, the Sabbath, and holidays; food, money, purity, and mourning; marriage; civil and criminal rabbinical law. The author, Joseph Caro, was a Sephardi and knew nothing about the laws and customs of the Eastern Jews; therefore the text was later revised by the famous rabbi Moses Isserles of Kraków, who wrote a commentary, shrewdly entitled The Tablecloth, which he intended as a way of filling the gaps in the work and making it suitable for Ashkenazi readers.
Jews, as we know, are forbidden to utter the “true” name of God: even though it is printed in books, when one is reading aloud it must be replaced by synonyms. Normally, it is permissible to utter the word “God” in languages other than Hebrew (though I once knew a German Jew who, out of extreme reverence and fear of sinning, wrote Gtt instead of Gott in his letters; the few Italian disciples of the Lubavitcher Rebbe do the same thing, writing D-o instead of Dio), and yet the authors of The Set Table and The Tablecloth worry about what might happen in public baths, where the presence of naked human bodies makes the atmosphere intensely profane; and so, in the baths, it is preferable not to utter the name of God “even in German or Polish.” As you see, this is certainly a gloss by Isserles: for that matter, it does not seem that in sixteenth-century Spain public baths were very common. For similar reasons, one must not write adiós, addio, or adieu in the closing salutations of letters: the letter might become dirty or wind up in the garbage.
The concept of nudity is vast, especially where women are concerned: nudity includes every portion of the body that is habitually covered, and likewise the hair. In short, nudity includes everything that can attract a man’s attention and distract him from the thought of God; therefore “even the voice of a woman singing” is comparable to nudity.
The same extreme tendency, that of “building a hedge around the law,” is also observed with regard to the prohibition against working on the Sabbath. The fundamental labors of the lives of farmers and artisans of the period are extended with unrestrained imagination. It is forbidden to crush grapes: therefore, any “squeezing” is likewise forbidden; for example, one cannot squeeze fruit; but if the liquid so obtained is to be discarded, then it is permissible to squeeze, and one can squeeze and drain salad. It is forbidden to hunt; what should one do about a flea? It is permissible to catch it and cast it far away, but the flea must not be killed. To hunt is also to capture or to trap: therefore, before you close a crate or a trunk, you must make certain that it contains neither flies nor moths. If you were to shut them in, you would be guilty of hunting, inadvertently and unknowingly, and you would have violated the Sabbath.
How are you to behave if, on the Sabbath, you chance to notice that your vat is leaking? You can’t plug the leak, because that would be menial labor; nor can you explicitly ask your Christian servant or friend to take care of it, because ordering others to work is forbidden, too. Nor can you suggest paying him the following day, because that would be a contract, and contracts, too, are forbidden on the Sabbath.
This is the solution offered: if the damage threatens to be serious, you can state impersonally, “If someone were to repair this, he would have no reason to regret it.”
On the day of rest and cheer it is also forbidden to write and erase, perhaps in commemoration of the time when writing meant chiseling letters into stone. This prohibition has given rise to an impressively ramified body of case studies. Tracing letters, or even curlicues, on a fogged glass is not permitted; when handling a book, one must take care not to scratch its cover with a fingernail; on the other hand, it is permissible to eat a cake that bears writing or images. To sweep is a form of abrasion and so, with reckless expansion of the concept, it is included among the tasks that are forbidden because it entails an erasure; but it is permissible to do so “in an unaccustomed way,” for instance, by using goose feathers instead of a broom. It is forbidden to light a fire and also to extinguish a fire. Of course, it is permissible to put out a fire on the Sabbath if it endangers human lives; however, “if an article of clothing catches fire, one may pour water on the part that is not burning, but not directly on the fire.”
Idolatry must be held in abomination. One must not even allow one’s gaze to rest on idols, or draw any closer to them than a distance of four cubits. If, when you pass close by an idol, a thorn may chance to pierce your foot, you must not bend down to remove it, because that might be seen by some as a gesture of respect, but you must refrain from bending over even if no one is there to see, because it might appear as such to you yourself later, in your memory. You must move away, or take a seat, or, at the very least, turn your back to the idol.
Concerning the prohibition against eating meat and dairy together, hypotheses and solutions that recall the studies and problems of chess players are formulated: that is to say, situations are imagined that are abstract and elegantly improbable, but useful for subtle reasoning. If two pious Jews dine together at the same table, and one is eating meat and the other dairy, they must draw a line on the tablecloth to separate the two areas, or in some manner mark a boundary. They must not drink from the same glass, because traces of food can stick to it. If along with the meat you make a dish with almond “milk,” you must leave a few whole almonds, to make it evident that it’s not real milk.
What can we say of this labyrinth? The product of bygone days? A waste of time and intelligence? A deterioration of religious sentiment to a mass of rules? Is this Set Table something we should discard, forget, or defend? And if we should defend it, just how? I don’t think that we can shake off this book, or ritual in general, for
that matter, with a shrug, the way we do with things that mean nothing to us. Ritual, all ritual, is a condensation of history and prehistory: it’s a fruit pit with a fine, complex structure, it’s a riddle to be solved; if solved, it can help us to solve other riddles that affect us more intimately. And besides, the Manes, or ancestral spirits, surely count for something.
Moreover, I sense in this Table an allure that belongs to all times, the allure of subtilitas, of the impartial play of the intellect: splitting hairs is not the pursuit of an idler but, rather, a form of mental training. Behind these curious pages I perceive an age-old taste for audacious discussion, an intellectual flexibility that isn’t afraid of contradictions but, if anything, welcomes them as an inevitable ingredient of life; and life is rules, life is order prevailing over Chaos, but rules have wrinkles, unexplored inlets of exceptions, license, indulgence, and disarray. Woe to those who erase them: they may contain the seeds of all our tomorrows, because the machinery of the universe is subtle, subtle are the laws that govern it, and every year we discover new subtleties in the rules that particles obey. Einstein’s observation has been quoted often: “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not”; subtle, therefore, in His image, must be those who follow Him. It is worth noting that in the ranks of physicists and cybernetic engineers there are many Jews whose origins are in Eastern Europe: could their esprit de finesse be nothing more than a Talmudic heritage?
Above all, however, and beneath the serious exterior, I sense in this Table a laughter that I like: it is the same laughter one finds in the Jewish folk tales where the rules are boldly upended, and it is our own laughter, the laughter of “modern” readers. Whoever wrote that pinching a flea between thumb and forefinger is a form of hunting, or that to open a book on the Sabbath that has writing on the edges of the book block is probably unlawful (because, by so doing, one erases a written message), laughed as he wrote, the way we laugh as we read: he was no different from us, even if he was occupied with distinguishing between lawful and unlawful forms of work, and we with corporate balance sheets or reinforced concrete or alphanumeric codes.