by Primo Levi
It strikes me that, as you do this work, it’s crucial to remain aware of the original meaning of every word; if you remember, for instance, that “to unleash” once meant “to free from a leash,” you’ll be sure to use the word properly and avoid clichés. Not all your readers will appreciate the effort involved, but all will at least realize that the choice of language was not obvious, that you did some work on their behalf, that you didn’t choose the path of least resistance.
Ninety years after the birth of psychoanalysis, and years of efforts both successful and unsuccessful to transfer the subconscious directly onto the page, I feel an acute need for clarity and rationality, and I think that most readers share that desire. There’s no rule stating that clear writing is simple; it can be read at various levels, but I believe that, at the lowest level, a text should be easily accessible to a broad audience. Don’t be afraid of mistreating your id by muzzling it. There’s no real danger of that; “the tenant on the floor below” will always find a way of making himself heard, because to write is to strip oneself naked—even the sparest writer strips himself bare. If baring yourself isn’t something you’ll enjoy, then be content with your current job. And I was forgetting to mention that, if you wish to write, you should have something to write.
Please accept my best regards.
Yours,
PRIMO LEVI
1. Tommaseo refers to an eight-volume nineteenth-century dictionary of the Italian language; the Nuovo Zingarelli is a modern dictionary.
The Need for Fear
Nearly all of us are afraid of the Forficula: I’m talking about the earwig, the dark-brown insect with an elongated, flattish body whose abdomen terminates in a pair of dangerous-looking pincers. Earwigs lie hidden under the bark of trees, or sometimes nest in sun-warmed clothing, in the folds of umbrellas or lounge chairs. They’re harmless: the pincer isn’t venomous, in fact, it doesn’t even pinch (it’s an organ that facilitates mating); and it isn’t true, even though the story’s been handed down persistently from one generation to the next, that “if you’re not careful, they’ll crawl into your ear.” This belief is so firmly rooted in our collective memory that it is acknowledged in the binomial nomenclature of the little creature, which is in fact officially called Forficula auricularia; but the English and the Germans didn’t wait for the scientific baptism, and for centuries they have respectively dubbed it “earwig” and Ohrwurm, the insect or worm of the ear. Aside from its pincer, the Forficula possesses another property that strikes a strange fear into us: like all nocturnal animals, if exposed to light it passes suddenly from immobility to flight, and its startlement reverberates in a startlement of our own.
All women, and many men, are afraid of bats. This, too, is a localized fear with a false basis: “They fly into your hair, and since they have hooked claws, you can’t disentangle them”; it’s no accident that bats, too, are nocturnal animals, and have an irregular flight, made up of uneasy, sudden swerves. Now, our domestic bats are harmless and helpless and afraid of human beings, never approaching them or allowing themselves to be approached; but our racist aversion as diurnal animals to the “bad people, bad people who wander about in the night” (in the words of Don Abbondio) persists even in the absence of any experimental confirmation. Those who wander about in the night are wicked by definition, and in his most widespread image the devil, when he has wings, has the wings of a bat, while fairies have butterfly wings and angels the wings of a swan. Perhaps our enmity toward bats is reinforced by their distant parentage with the ill-famed vampire, but vampires, the real ones, not the vampires of the dark legends of the Carpathians, are themselves virtually harmless: the quantity of blood that they consume in a session (rarely blood drawn from a human being) is less than a twentieth of what we give in a single donation to a blood bank, voluntarily and without any harm to ourselves, indeed, without noticing the loss.
All women and many men feel horror for rats, likewise nocturnal and furtive. Do you remember Winston, the main character in Orwell’s terrifying Nineteen Eighty-Four? He withstands ferocious torture and keeps his dignity intact, but he breaks down, and betrays his woman (“Do it to Julia! Not me! . . . Strip her to the bones”), when his torturer threatens to thrust a rat into his face. When you reread that page of the book, there is no doubt: the obsessive fear that Orwell attributes to his character is his own fear, a phobia of his, perfectly compatible with the admirable courage that he showed throughout his life, in peacetime and in war. To Winston, and to Orwell, “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.” We all know the absurd and picturesque justification (anatomical, as in the two previous cases) offered by folk mythology for this phobia: rats like holes, and, if they are able, they will crawl up one’s intestine or up the female genitalia.
I don’t believe that there’s any need to trouble the field of psychoanalysis for an interpretation of these or any other atavistic fears, a field that in the hands of amateurs so easily lends itself to after-the-fact explanations of all mental phenomena, along with their opposites, and yet is so inept at predicting them in advance. There’s nothing archetypal or innate at work here, and it strikes me that we can settle for a simpler approach: in every culture there are dangers, real or presumed or exaggerated, that are handed down from father (or more frequently from mother) to children, along chains of countless generations, and they create corresponding fears. The fact that some people are immune to them proves nothing: each individual has certain predispositions or defenses. For that matter, a comparable transmission of fears takes place among bovines: mother cows, when they see their newborns approach a clump of poisonous hellebore to graze on it, shove them away with their horns; but precisely because there is no such thing as a bovine “culture,” the only prohibitions and rules handed down are those dictated by experience, not those which emerge from intellectual constructs.
Along the borderline of this vast region of traditional fears (and not of animals alone: when I was a child a long forgotten nanny forbade me to touch buttercups “because they’ll make your fingernails fall out”) lies the fear of snakes; or perhaps on the far side of that border, since there are, in fact, snakes in Italy whose bite can be fatal. These are only three or four species of viper, but their populations seem to be rising, both because of the spreading abandonment of mountain farmlands and because of the stupid extermination of predatory birds, their natural antagonists. They do in fact exist, despite fundamentalist ecologists, who postulate an unfailingly benign and friendly nature, and they pose a not insignificant danger, especially to children; but around the core of the silent, death-dealing creature that slithers along on its belly, we have over the millennia constructed an intense emotional aura and a swarm of legends.
The flesh-and-blood snake, like any other animal, is impervious to issues of morality: it’s neither good nor evil, it eats and is eaten. It occupies a variety of ecological niches, and its structure, so (apparently) simple and uncommon, is the product of a very lengthy and nonlinear evolutionary history; in fact, like the cetaceans, snakes once possessed four limbs that “they realized” they could do without, and traces of them can still be glimpsed in their skeletons. Snakes have patented a diverse array of ingenious and specific inventions: a “thermal eye” that is sensitive to infrared rays, that is, to heat emitted by birds and mammals, and which only recently (and for the same purpose: to locate a victim at night) has man succeeded in imitating; a jaw that can be unhinged at will, allowing the snake to ingest enormous prey into its stomach; and, in venomous species, a double syringe with instantaneous effects.
The literary serpent, on the other hand, is morally stained: from the very first pages of Genesis, where it appears as the canniest of animals and the advisor of the original sin, it is evil and cursed, and its slithering is at once a punishment and a symbol. To the ancients, man’s vertical nature was a sign of his quasi-divine status: he tends toward the heavens, he is the link between Earth and the stars. Quadrupeds are something intermediate, t
hey are prone, their gaze is directed earthward, but they are separate from the dust: they run, they leap. The serpent clings to the dust, it is made of dust, and dust it shall eat (Genesis 3:14), like the worm, of which it is an enlarged version, and the worm is the child of putrefaction.
The serpent is the beast by definition, and it contains nothing that is human: significantly, the Italian word for snake, biscia, is nothing other than a variant on the Latin and Italian bestia (“beast”), and we see the legless creature as something more distant from us than ants or crickets or spiders, which all have legs (perhaps too many legs, and legs with too many knees). In fact, Dante identifies the snake with the thief, who, like the snake, slithers silently, and creeps into men’s houses by night; in the seventh circle of hell, thieves and serpents endlessly turn into one another. In the 237 fables of La Fontaine, the wolf appears fifteen times, the lion seventeen times, the fox nineteen times, and they are all intensely humanized, both in their vices and in their virtues; the serpent occurs only three times, in marginal and vaguely allusive roles.
As far as I can recall, the only “positive” snake in literature is Kipling’s python Kaa. Kaa, the Flathead, is wise, cautious, vain, deaf, and old as the jungle, but he regains his youth anew every time he sheds his beautiful skin. He is a friend to Mowgli, but a distant one: a cold-blooded friend, cunning and incomprehensible, from whom the Frog, man-cub, can learn a great deal, but of whom he must always be wary.
There aren’t many snakes in my own personal history. Once, in a village square, I was holding my infant son in my arms, watching some hens peck and scratch; a shoelace was dangling from the beak of one of the hens. Every so often the hen would lay the shoelace down on the ground, only to snatch it up jealously if one of her colleagues ventured over to take it away from her. Suddenly I noticed that the shoelace was moving: it was a small snake, in poor shape from the pecking it had received. I felt a Biblical hatred awaken inside me: it was a serpent, and therefore a viper, and so it was my duty to kill it. I thrust the child into the arms of the first person who happened by, and to the astonishment of the onlookers I started chasing the hen, which was even more astonished and justifiably indignant. After a brief pursuit, I managed to lay hands on the already doomed victim, and I crushed it underfoot with the clear conscience of a man who knows he’s performing his duty as both a father and a citizen. I wouldn’t do it now, or at least I would give it some thought: vipers, even healthy ones, are much slower than folk zoology would have you think, and also, therefore, less dangerous.
Perhaps we have a deep-seated need for these false fears, midway between reality, playacting, and simple play—fears of rats, buttercups, and spiders. They are a way of falling into line with tradition, confirming that we are children of the culture in which we grew up; or perhaps they help us to relegate to the shadows other fears, much closer and much vaster.
The Eclipse of the Prophets
In recent years there has been a great deal of talk about malaise, and that malaise has been the subject of round tables and conferences. Malaise is a real thing, certainly: still, it’s a cumulative term, covering an array of different phenomena, and it varies in extent from country to country. It would be black humor to speak of malaise in places where people are dying of starvation, thirst, disease, and war: let us restrict ourselves to the countries we know best, and where people “live well,” in particular Europe.
Europeans, these days, fear neither civil nor European wars; they aren’t starving; if they get sick, they won’t die in the dust but will find medical care that is more or less effective; their children have a reasonable chance of living to adulthood; they live better than their parents and grandparents did; and yet they experience malaise and they give this malaise various names. The leading cause of this malaise is, or ought to be, fear of the bomb. Seen in this light, the situation is unprecedented in human history: there has never before been anything remotely similar, where a single decision, a single action can lead to the instantaneous destruction of the human race and the probable disappearance, in a matter of weeks, of all forms of life on Earth.
This fear is strange and formless; it’s too vast to be rationally accepted. It doesn’t weigh on us as one might expect but has assumed the form of an obscure unease, due to the novelty of the condition, a condition for which we find ourselves unprepared. There exists, and it has been made into a theory, something we could call a “mathematical fear,” which is mathematical hope with its sign reversed; it is the product of the damage expected (or, respectively, the advantage expected) multiplied by the probability that it will take place. This concept is abstract, and it doesn’t help us. The damage here is maximal: is it infinite? No, because death, even if it’s horrendous, even if it means the death of us all, puts an end to suffering; still, the damage remains incalculable. But we cannot estimate its probability, the second of the two factors. Unconsciously, imperceptibly, each of us has calculated it to be minimal, close to zero, so that the product, our fear, remains within tolerable limits and allows us to sleep, eat, make love, have children, follow the soccer championships, watch TV, and go on vacation. We’ve managed to minimize that probability (and we may even be right, let that be clear) because the situation is a new one. We lack the one tool that can help us estimate the probability of a future event: a count of the number of times and the circumstances under which it has taken place in the past.
This tool is useful only when the event has occurred many times; grave international tensions are followed by wars, and wars—experience tells us—are followed by epidemics and famine. But here we have no experience: total, all-encompassing, definitive war is something new, in the face of which we are all blank slates. The damage is new, and our ignorance of its likelihood is new. Our only hope rests on the thought that powerful politicians must surely know that they’d wind up in the furnace, too, along with their quibbles and their systems. That hope is not entirely misplaced, and it is further amplified by our tendency to repress our fears.
To be exact: there is a tendency, irrational but observed over the centuries, and unmistakable in situations of danger, to place the likelihood of a terrible event at the extremes of a range of values, zero and one—impossibility and certainty. We noticed it in the concentration camps, a ferocious sociological observation post. If I may be permitted to quote myself, I wrote nearly forty years ago, in If This Is a Man:
If we were logical, we would resign ourselves to this evidence, that our fate is utterly unknowable, that every conjecture is arbitrary and has absolutely no foundation in reality. But men are rarely logical when their own fate is at stake; they prefer in every case extreme positions. Thus, depending on our character, some of us are immediately convinced that all is lost, that one cannot survive here and that the end is certain and near; others are convinced that, however hard the life that awaits us, salvation is likely and not far off, and, if we have faith and strength, we will see our homes and our dear ones again. The two classes, pessimists and optimists, are not in fact so distinct: not just because the agnostics are many but because the majority, without memory or consistency, go back and forth between the two extreme positions, according to the moment and the person they are speaking to.
It seems to me that, except for a few changes in the units of measurement, these observations likewise apply to the world we Europeans now live in, free from want but not from fear. As far as I can tell, we have difficulties with the entire gamut of possibility; total credulity and total incredulity are the chosen alternatives, and the latter prevails over the former. We are extremists: we overlook the middle ground, we are despairing or (as we are today) carefree; but we live badly. Still, we ought to reject this inborn tendency of ours toward the radical, because it’s the root of evil. Both the zero and the one push us toward inaction: if some future damage is either impossible or certain, then the question “What is to be done?” becomes moot. Now this is not the state of things: nuclear holocaust is a possibility, and its likelihood d
epends on a great number of factors, including our specific behaviors, both individual and collective. It’s not easy to say what we ought to do, but certainly, in all our private and political choices, the fact that the future is at least partly in our own hands, that it is plastic, not rigid, should never be forgotten. In particular, those who are closest to power should not forget it: politicians, soldiers, scientists, and great engineers. If they unleash the apocalypse, they’ll be destroyed by it as well, and uselessly: to the detriment of all, to the benefit of none.
And so I believe that a great deal of our malaise comes from the extreme unknowability of the future, which discourages any long-term planning. This did not seem to be the human condition even just twenty years ago. We were not so helpless then, or, rather, we were but we weren’t aware of it. We had always operated on the basis of models, gilded distant idols, and we’ve shown a singular versatility (and gift for forgetfulness) in the way we dispensed with old models and replaced them with new ones, different or even opposite: as long as we had some model. Long ago, Pliny the Elder wrote about the improbable Hyperboreans, who lived long and happy lives beyond the icy, snowbound Ripaean Mountains, in a land of perpetual springtime (even though the night there lasted six months), and who killed themselves only when they were tired of living. We’ve had Eden, Cathay, and Eldorado; under the Fascist regime we chose the great democracies as our model (and rightly so); then, at different times, according to various trends, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Sweden. We tended to prefer far-off lands, because a model, by definition, must be perfect; and since no real country is perfect, it’s helpful to choose little known, distant models that we can safely idealize without fear of clashing with reality. In any case, we’d constructed a destination for ourselves: our compass needle pointed in one definite direction.