by Primo Levi
It’s the only game that I’ve accepted and have remained faithful to: others bore me, I’m pained if I lose, but I’m not happy if I win. I accepted this one for remote dynastic reasons: in some obscure way, the old household chessboard contains our Lares; it’s perhaps the only object that was materially transmitted from father to son. For countless generations every ancestor of mine has taught the rules to his son, beat him for a few years, then tacitly admitted his superiority. I don’t mean to say that the level improves from generation to generation; it’s that skill at chess reaches its peak around twenty and then decreases with age, a sad but natural fact.
Now the electronic player has erupted onto this traditional scene. With due homage to the confraternity of fine minds that programmed it, comparison is obligatory: which opponent is the more desirable? Man or machine? The response can only be vague, indeed, evanescent; comparisons should be made between comparable terms, and these two are not. All the same, we can try.
The machine is always there, at any time of day or night. You do not have to invite it over or go to its house, it is always at your disposal; it does not get tired, it does not get rattled, it does not try to rattle you (as human chess players notoriously do, especially if they are experienced). You can assign it various levels: that is, you can choose an opponent of equal skill.
This, however, comes at a certain price, at least with my program: the more skillful your antagonist is, the longer he makes you wait for his move. Now, a five-minute wait before a human opponent is tolerable; you watch his face while his eyes are fixed on the chessboard, trying to read his intentions or at least his state of mind. The machine, on the other hand, is inscrutable; it, too, “thinks” for the entire time you have allowed it, but its rapid examination of possible decisions produces only an illegible swarm of figures on the screen, next to the chessboard: a succession of hypotheses too fast (five or ten per second!) for the eye to follow. The machine’s five minutes are extremely long.
As I said, you can choose a counterpart that plays well, moderately well, or poorly; in every case, it plays with a style that is not human. Man has flashes of illumination (not just in regard to chess!) in which he surpasses himself, and these can be translated into brilliant moves, which in customary notation are marked by one or even two exclamation points. But he also has moments of distraction (these, on the other hand, have a question mark), whose frequency gradually increases toward the end of the game and the end of his chess career. The machine is flat: it does not make exclamatory moves, but it’s never distracted, and it doesn’t grow old.
This doesn’t mean that it never makes mistakes; it makes mistakes, certainly, and it always makes the same mistakes. I have noticed, for example, that it is impetuously greedy: if there is a piece of yours to be taken, it swoops down to capture it, even if its own downfall lies in waiting on the other side of the chessboard. These are evidently lapses in the program; if you spot them, and learn to take advantage of them, the match is won, but the pleasure of the game is lost.
An exciting menu of so-called accessory services is offered. The game can be recorded: if it’s a good one, you can replay it and relive the emotions. You can interrupt it at any time and resume it when you want. If you are doubtful about what to do, you can ask the machine for advice, and it will answer you, in the fairest, most chivalrous manner. If, like me, you are weak in the openings (which chess players worthy of the name know by heart), you can ask the machine to eliminate them from its assortment, in order to even out your handicap. At each move, a score appears on the screen, describing the situation on the basis of complicated parameters. If it’s positive, it indicates that things are going badly for you: if it exceeds 500, you would do better to bow out; if it exceeds 1000, catastrophe is looming.
Correspondingly, a negative score indicates that you are winning, owing to material advantage or to position. Of course, if this mute commentator annoys or bothers you, you can get rid of it. You can even ask the machine to play against itself, and there is something hallucinatory about the spectacle, since the game that is played out in silence, before your eyes, is never the same. The inspired minds that created the program introduced into it a margin of uncertainty, a little “free will,” as a result of which the machine does not always act in the identical way in an identical situation.
The hidden mechanical player (whose nearly human intelligence is enclosed in a diskette that weighs just a few grams) is therefore a great seducer: he is always there waiting for you, always ready and always new, mannerly, and ruthless. He calls to you, distracts you from your work and also from your reading, but he is not human. You can admire his skill, as one admires the dancing Lipizzaner horses or the seals in the circus; you can even feel a curious compassion for him—illicitly, since in the end he is merely a diskette—when you see him droning before an intricate situation. But a flesh-and-blood opponent is qualitatively different.
He’s your blood relation, even if you’ve known him for only a few hours. You can see him face-to-face, you can test your skill against him, you know that he is as capable as you are of happy inspirations and gross blunders. At the end of a game, as at the end of a life, you can speak to him with the intimacy resulting from the match, comment on his mistakes and yours, judge him and hear yourself judged. He learns (“sadly learns”)1 from you and you from him, while the machine already knows everything and learns nothing. Still, there is something that you can learn from it, even if it is only patience and attention, and (why not?) endgame theory.
October 19, 1985
1. A reference to Purgatory VI:3.
Man in Flight
About the competition announced by Tuttoscienze regarding experiments to be carried out in the absence of gravity: unfortunately, I am no longer of an age to participate, but the experiment that I would most willingly attempt would be that of finding myself released from the weight of my body, if only for a few minutes. Not that my weight is excessive (it fluctuates within a more than reasonable range); nevertheless I feel an intense envy for the weightless astronauts whom we are permitted to see on our television screens for a few grudging moments. They seem at ease, like fish in water: moving elegantly in their cabin, which is by now quite spacious, they propel themselves with the aid of unseen handholds, navigating smoothly through the air and landing safely at their workstations.
At other times, we’ve seen them talking naturally with each other, one “head up” and one “head down” (though it’s clear that in orbit there is no longer an up or a down), or taking turns playing childish pranks: one shot a piece of candy with his thumbnail and it flew very slowly, in a straight line, to land in his colleague’s open mouth. At other times we’ve seen an astronaut squeezing water into the air from a plastic container: the water did not fall or disperse, but settled into a rounded mass, which, obeying the surface tension, despite its weakness, lazily assumed the shape of a sphere. What could they have done with it afterward? It could not have been easy to get rid of it without damaging the delicate instruments that crowd the walls.
I wonder what they’re waiting for—why not produce a documentary by splicing together these images, miraculously transmitted by satellites in lightning-quick flight over our heads and above our atmosphere? Such a film, drawn from American and Soviet sources, and accompanied by an intelligent commentary, would teach us all a lot. It would certainly be more successful than the countless inanities that are fed to us, not to mention porn films.
I’ve often wondered, too, what the point is of the experiments and simulation courses that aspiring astronauts are subjected to—and which journalists speak of without batting an eye—and how they are carried out. Apparently, the only conceivable technique would be to shut the candidates up in a vehicle in free fall: an airplane, or an elevator like the one Einstein postulated for the conceptual experiment meant to illustrate restricted relativity.
But an airplane, even in a vertical fall, is restrained by air resistance, and an elevator (or ra
ther a descender) is restrained by friction against the guide rails. In neither case would weightlessness (the abaria for intransigent Hellenists) be complete. And even in the most favorable scenario, the rather terrifying one of an airplane falling straight down from a height of ten or twenty kilometers—perhaps helped by the engines in the last stretch—it would not last more than about ten seconds on balance, too little time for training and for measuring physiological data. And then you’d still have to brake. . . .
And yet, nearly all of us have done a “simulation” of this definitely non-earthly condition. We did it in a childhood dream: in the most typical version, the dreamer realizes with joyous wonder that flying is as easy as walking or swimming. How could he have been so stupid as not to have thought of it before? All you have to do is row with the palms of your hands, and there you are, you take off from the ground, move forward effortlessly, turn around, avoid obstacles, go through doors and windows with precision, hover outside in the open air: not with the frenetic fluttering of sparrows’ wings, not with the voracious, strident haste of swallows, but with the silent majesty of eagles and clouds. Where do we get it, this anticipation of a reality that today has been fulfilled? Perhaps it is a memory of the species, inherited from our aquatic reptilian ancestors. Or perhaps this dream is instead the prelude to an undefined future in which the umbilical tug of Mother Earth’s call will be gratuitous and self-evident, and a much nobler means of locomotion will prevail than that of our complicated, erratic legs, full of internal frictions and, at the same time, requiring the external friction of feet against the ground.
An illustrious poetic version of this endlessly yearned-for abaria comes to mind, the episode of Geryon in Canto XVII of the Inferno. The “brute animal,” reconstructed by Dante based on classical models but also on tales found in medieval bestiaries, is at once imaginary and splendidly real. He eludes weight. Waiting for the two strange passengers, only one of whom is subject to gravity, he rests his body on the shore, but his deadly tail floats freely “in the void,” like the stern of a Zeppelin secured to the mooring. At the beginning, Dante says that he is afraid of him, but then that magical descent over the Malebolgias claims the full attention of the poet-scientist, who is paradoxically intent on a naturalistic study of his fictitious creature, describing his monstrous and symbolic epidermis with precision.
The brief report is singularly accurate, down to the detail confirmed by pilots of modern hang gliders: since it is a silent, gliding flight, the perception of speed on the part of the traveler depends neither on the rhythm of the wings nor on the noise but only on the sensation of the air on his face and the wind below him: “I feel only / the wind upon my face and the wind rising.”1 Perhaps Dante, too, unconsciously, reproduced here the universal dream of weightless flight, to which the psychoanalysts attribute dubious and disgraceful meanings.
The ease with which man adapts to weightlessness is a fascinating mystery. When you think that for many people traveling by sea, or even only by car, gives rise to troublesome complaints, you can’t help but remain puzzled. The astronauts, during the months of their stay in space, complained merely of short-lived discomforts, and the doctors who examined them after the event found only a slight calcium loss in the bones and a temporary atrophy of the muscles and the heart; the same effects, in short, of a hospital stay. Yet nothing in our long evolutionary history could have prepared us for a condition as unnatural as non-gravity.
We therefore possess vast and unexpected margins of safety. The visionary plan (one of many) put forth by Freeman Dyson in Disturbing the Universe, of a humanity migrating among the stars on vessels with gigantic sails driven free of charge by stellar light, might have other limitations, but not that of abaria: our poor body, so defenseless against swords, guns, and viruses, is space-proof.
December 24, 1985
1. Inferno XVII:116–17.
Peroxide Blonde
While looking for something else, I opened at random the “Concise” version of the Oxford Dictionary, and the word “peroxide”* happened to jump out at me. As an emeritus chemist, I felt a slight visceral response, and I paused over the text. It gives the technical definition of the term, saying that in common language it refers exclusively to peroxide of hydrogen, that is, to hydrogen peroxide. Then it reads: “Peroxide blonde (usually in a pejorative sense): a woman whose hair is bleached that way.” Incidentally, I deplore here the chauvinism of the definition; there are, and always have been, men whose hair is also “bleached that way.”
In effect, even the Italian equivalent of peroxide blonde, bionda ossigenata (“oxygenated blonde”), contains a negative connotation. It refers to a non-blonde who pretends to be a blonde, though her hair is probably gray by now; it’s a person who wants to be noticed, since peroxide blond is flashy and not likely to be confused with natural blond, but who hasn’t reckoned on the fact that bleached hair is yellowish, lackluster, and brittle.
In all other contexts, on the contrary, the terms “oxygenated” and “oxygen” are decidedly positive. We say that mountain air is (beneficially) oxygenated, which isn’t true; it’s beneficial for other, valid reasons, but it contains less oxygen per liter than the air of the plain. Oxygen is considered to be a vital element. It is, and in fact it is administered, with all due caution, to the dying, but if it’s breathed in its pure state it has a harmful effect within a few hours; if it comes in contact with sawdust, shavings, or metallic dust, it can cause huge problems.
This emotional ambivalence is a widespread phenomenon. Our innate tendency to simplify has given rise to countless cases in which a substance or a quality is “good” in a particular place, time, or context, and “bad” in others. A salesman will tell you, with the same professional enthusiasm, that a paint is good because it is synthetic, and that a fiber or a drug is good because it is natural. I don’t believe that there exists a more double-edged adjective than “synthetic.” For literary critics it is laudatory, equivalent to terse and concise. For impromptu ecologists it is synonymous with proscribed, injurious, fraudulent; yet I don’t think that they refuse aspirin, perhaps because this hopelessly synthetic medicine has been around for more than eighty years, and is therefore viewed as natural, or at least naturalized. Curiously, the chemists who stood godfather to it had taken care to indicate its synthetic nature in the name itself. A-spirin meant “without Spiraea”: in fact, before it was synthesized commercially, the salicylic acid that it contains was extracted from a shrub, Spiraea ulmaria.
And are the extremely natural snake venoms, strychnine, strophanthus, and curare, good? Are synthetic dyes and pigments better, or, rather, “more good,” than natural ones? Take the word of someone who has tested them: try comparing the old Prussian blue, overall still natural enough, or the prehistoric lapis lazuli, with phthalocyanine blue, and you’ll see.
“Plastic” is considered bad, and I regret this, because I know how much talent produced it. The original adjective has become a noun, and the plural (“plastics”) an absurd singular; in fact, there are several hundred plastics by now, as different from one another as are metals or mammals, and they are the object of a loathing whose global reach itself suggests mania. There are some good ones, solid, economical, and nonpolluting, and, vice versa, some bad ones. The good ones can become bad if used for the wrong purpose, as if one were to make a plowshare out of lead or a telephone cable out of iron. The pejorative expression “It’s only plastic” is a twin of “He’s only a health service doctor,” and is part of the reductive universe of those whom Julian Huxley has fittingly termed “nothing-else-but-ists.”
This dualism without nuance is especially vigorous in everything that concerns health. A recent example is the case of a bottled water that, until some decades ago, bore an ostentatious label: “The most radioactive in the world.” The slogan (which I think was true) was based on the vague connection radio = energy = health. Radioactivity, in short, was good. At that time, in fact, ideas about the harmful effects of prol
onged exposure to ionizing radiation were still somewhat vague. Fortunately, the radioactivity in that water, though relatively high, was insufficient in absolute terms to cause any effect, either good or bad. Clearly the water was only diuretic, like all waters, radioactive or not, mineral, sparkling, still, thermal, or tap. When the dangers of radiation were recognized, the slogan, reduced to a tiny type size, was moved to the bottom of the label. Finally, a few years ago, it disappeared entirely. The water has not changed its name but, prudently, it is drawn from a different spring, whose radioactivity is negligible.
Something similar happened in France with a fabric made of synthetic fibers. People noticed that in contact with the human body it gave rise to sparks from static electricity (as wool and silk have always done). Right away, posters appeared in which a man dressed in “synthetics” skipped happily on a bundle of flashing threads: static electricity was “good for you.” Then someone launched the (equally absurd) theory that car trouble was caused specifically by the accumulation on the vehicle of static electricity due to the friction of the tires on asphalt; and so those funny grounding strips that you still see dangling from some bumpers came into being. Static charges had become bad, and had to be grounded. Human credulity has no limits. Or, better yet, advertisers’ confidence in human credulity has no limits.
There are chemical elements that are permanently bad: of all of them sulfur takes the lead, beautiful in appearance, like Lucifer, but foul-smelling and corrosive. It burns in the air almost as if it wanted to mimic coal, but it generates a caustic smoke that destroys the lungs. Other elements have had various fates, and among them the case of cobalt is noteworthy. Until the advent of artificial radioisotopes, only the sky was “cobalt,” for literary types of little imagination; anyway, it indicated an exceedingly beautiful blue, a super-blue. Now, after the use of cobalt 60 in treating tumors, this metal has acquired a sinister resonance: “Poor thing, they’re giving him cobalt.” And yet, from what I’ve heard, it has restored health or life to many.