by Primo Levi
JOURNALIST: Tell me: you made a radical choice. No sky, no sun or moon—in other words, perpetual darkness and silence. Isn’t it a little monotonous? Don’t you get bored?
MOLE: You are all the same. You measure everything according to your human standards. Yes, it was a choice, but a reasoned one. I preferred hearing, smell, and touch to sight. Don’t think that I don’t have ears, just because they can’t be seen from the outside. My sense of hearing is ten times as sharp as yours—on a logarithmic scale, of course. I can hear a root grow, the rustling of an earthworm. And to protect myself from your unbearable din all I have to do is descend fifty or sixty centimeters: there I am even protected from the frost. Monotonous? I can distinguish at least twenty different qualities of soil and I can sense humidity and wind before they arrive.
JOURNALIST: Would you mind showing me your front paws? I’d like to take a picture.
MOLE: No, what’s this—no pictures. And why don’t you call them hands? After all, they’re not that different from yours—just a lot more powerful. I bet that, big as you are, you wouldn’t withstand the traction force of one of my hands. After all, look, you should try to do what we do every day and every night. It’s been a while since it rained, the soil in my lawn is nice and crumbly—in other words, the conditions couldn’t be better. Go ahead, Mr. Man, abandon your erect posture for a moment, get down, prone, like us, and let’s start digging together, but without tools, okay? Well, you’ll see that I, a big old mole, super-slow, will be ten meters away while you’re still breaking your fingernails on the surface. And I will have dug myself a perfect tunnel, cylindrical, the soil well packed against the sides, because, ever since I was small, I’ve learned to advance by rotating, like a gimlet. We have our trade secrets, too.
JOURNALIST: You said you’re interested in females only a few days a year? Do you go and look for them?
MOLE: It’s consensual. Females have a particular scratching style that is more compact, and softer: we can hear them from afar, and they can hear us. When it’s time for love, the mutual search is a stimulating adventure. It’s also a choice. You hear digging above, below, to the east, to the west, this one is rougher, the other is smoother, until we decide for that one and off we go, digging vigorously, until the two tunnels meet. In fact, mostly we meet nose to nose, so that we can determine if our odors agree. If they do, the marriage is made.
JOURNALIST: Would you introduce me to your wife?
MOLE: I’d love to, because she’s a great girl. Beautiful, too: much younger than me. But it’s the end of March, and she’s gone off somewhere to prepare the wedding chamber. It meant a lot to me, and I made it clear. I wanted it to be spacious, comfortable, well carpeted with grass and moss—but that’s a female’s job.
JOURNALIST: And the job of a male, excuse me, what would that be?
MOLE: More or less like yours. You hunt for money and we hunt for earthworms. You invest in goods and real estate and we cut their heads off.
JOURNALIST: Whose? The earthworms’?
MOLE: Yes, it’s the best investment. You wouldn’t have thought so, would you? But a headless earthworm doesn’t escape and doesn’t rot. Do you know how many earthworms I have in the bank? More than eleven hundred, plus about forty assorted larvae. One has to think of the future, our own and our children’s. Once, digging, I even found a small viper, just hatched. I cut her head off, too, but after two days she had already started to age, and so, to keep her from going to waste, I devoured her immediately. You know, we pay for the strength in our arms: if we don’t eat the equivalent of our weight in fresh meat every day, we starve.
JOURNALIST: I understand. One moment while I write that down. Done. But now tell me: is it true that you never have the desire to explore the world above? Grass, flowers, running water? Or even the little animals that don’t go underground—crickets, snails, grasshoppers?
MOLE: Oh yes, I won’t deny it, but they are the adventures of youth. I, too, had them, on moonless nights with boys my age. There were a dozen of us. Imagine, once I found a nest of skylarks on the ground, with all the eggs in it—what a dinner that was! But the real entertainment was different: we would attract dogs by scratching loudly against a rock, let them come close, jump out for an instant with a scowl to frighten them, and then immediately burrow in again. You should have seen how they dug! But we went into reverse and in a second were already beyond their grasp. In other words, if we don’t deliberately go looking for trouble, no one bothers us. We have darkness, but we also have peace.
“Imaginary Zoo: Natural Histories by Primo Levi,”
Airone, January 1987
Adam’s Clay
How difficult it is to understand a text that is, admittedly, not well understood by its own author! This thought accompanied me during the challenging, but enlightening, reading of a recently published book, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, by A. Graham Cairns-Smith.1 Notwithstanding its lofty aim, this is a book for the general public, and it attempts to popularize an important and daring hypothesis.
Obviously, the title itself is at the same time an understatement* and full of promises. The origin of life on Earth is not a problem like any other; it’s the one problem over which all scientists, and not just biologists, have racked their brains since the beginning of science. There is no shortage of proposed solutions. Before Spallanzani and Pasteur, the accepted answer came from the classics and Aristotle: life originates by means of spontaneous generation from corrupt matter: frogs from mud, flies from filth. It was only in the nineteenth century that this naïve belief was dismissed: compared with microorganisms, frogs and worms are too complex to develop “by themselves”; but then what about microorganisms?
The electron microscope, along with the discoveries of genetics, was to provide a blunt and disappointing answer: microorganisms, too, are extremely complex. They are “high tech” machines, and thinking that they originate through spontaneous generation is as absurd as thinking that one can make a watch by shaking up together its smallest components. The fundamental, unique components of life, the nucleotides of nucleic acid, which are present in everything from molds to beech trees, giraffes, and ourselves, cannot develop by themselves; just think of the number and complexity of the steps that the chemist must follow to produce a single one of them, and of the precautions necessary to keep it from self-destruction.
And yet—unless we wish to resort to supernatural hypotheses—some spontaneous generation must have occurred. Toward the middle of this century, a curious experiment by Stanley Miller gave rise to great expectations. By exposing to “artificial storms” (high temperatures, electric discharges) a mixture of methane, water, ammonia, and hydrogen, he obtained the building blocks of organic life: traces of amino acids and nucleosides. Everyone, chemists and laymen, exulted. A path had been opened; the act of creation postulated by all religions and metaphysics was unnecessary. Life could have originated by itself, from the primeval soup made up of the oceans of the newborn Earth.
These hopes were to be crushed by more careful scrutiny. Bricks are not enough to build a house: a plan, a direction, a design are necessary. The key to life is orderly complexity, and the simple cannot give birth to the complex. Nor did it make much sense to claim that order came from the cosmos, as Hoyle recently stated: if so, who could have introduced order into the cosmos? Either the problem is shifted from one place to another or one must resort to God. Well, scientists respect God and those who believe in him, but they are reluctant to accept a premature intervention on his part, before they have exhausted all other possible explanations.
Cairns-Smith formulates a new and fascinating hypothesis. He begins with an analogy: imagine finding in an uninhabited area an arch made of stones that sustain one another. The first hypothesis is that this is a human artifact, or in any event the product of a superior intelligence: an arch doesn’t build itself. And yet one can imagine a different, “natural” mechanism. To build an arch, man might lay the stones upon a foundati
on, upon a natural stone scaffolding, which is later washed away by a flood. What if the same thing happened in the creation of life? If, in other words, primeval life were what is left of a construction whose haphazard base elements later disappeared?
Cairns-Smith believes that he has found this scaffolding in a material that is extremely common on Earth, of complex structure but extremely varied in its forms, as revealed by the electron microscope. Further, this material is ennobled by an illustrious Biblical reference. Primitive life, proto-life, would be based not on carbon but on clay silicates: yes, that same clay used by God the Father to make the first man.
The numerous clays studied by Cairns-Smith reveal surprising capacities: they absorb material from surrounding water, they grow, they subdivide, they mend themselves when damaged; moreover, they can form layers of almost imperceptible thickness, small tubes, porous masses. They are, in other words, the equivalent of tiny chemical labs, with equipment for filtering, distilling, concentrating, and so on. Most important, they can multiply by reproducing themselves; and how many such laboratories can be at work simultaneously! Nor is Cairns-Smith frightened by the capacity, typical of life, to extract carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphere in order to “make them organic”; when exposed to the sun, iron salts transform carbon dioxide into formic acid, and titanium oxide transforms nitrogen into ammonia—the rest is easy. . . .
The next step is not easy but, rather, frighteningly difficult: how, from the self-duplicating clays, can we arrive at the organic life that has triumphed today? I must admit (but Cairns-Smith admits it, too) that here things get confusing. The step would be gradual: a “usurpation,” as if, one by one, the original fibers were gradually removed from a hemp rope and replaced with nylon fibers. There would have to be a long cohabitation between the embryonic life of clays and organic life, with the final ascendancy of the latter. Like nucleic acids and proteins, clay particles are able to fold over on themselves, assuming characteristic and specific configurations that can even be transferred to other particles they come into contact with.
Are you satisfied, reader, as you try to read the great book of nature backward? I am, in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that the author himself reveals his doubts with dozens of “ifs,” “buts,” and “maybes” on every page. I emerged from this difficult and disconcerting reading with a vague impression of having witnessed a breakthrough, perhaps comparable to those of Newton and Darwin. Or, on the other hand, this may be nothing more than a “working hypothesis,” a scaffolding that will be demolished, whether the arch stands or collapses. At any rate, a new idea has come into play, halfway between chemistry and geology, and today we know how productive cross-fertilization among different disciplines is.
La Stampa, February 15, 1987
1. Published by Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Live from Our Intestine: Escherichia Coli
JOURNALIST (knocking delicately on the intestine wall): May I?
ESCHERICHIA COLI: Please! Come on in.
JOURNALIST: No, not to be rude, but, you see, I wouldn’t want to damage your host, who after all is a friend of mine. No drastic interventions. If you don’t mind, we’ll conduct the interview like this, me on the outside, you on the inside. I’m taping and the microphone is very sensitive: just try to speak up. Is this the first time you’ve been interviewed?
E. COLI: Yes, but don’t worry, I’m not at all nervous. We’re not easily excitable, both because of our temperament and because we lack a nervous system.
JOURNALIST: Do you like it down here, in the dark, with all this half-digested stuff that your host dumps on your head three or four times a day?
E. COLI: It’s fine, except when they give him antibiotics. Then life gets a little tough, but some of us survive, and we almost always manage to perpetuate the species. Please bear with me now, I’m in mitosis, that is, I’m splitting in two: but it’s just a matter of a few minutes, then one of my halves will be at your service again. Done, carry on; I’ll stay here while my twin goes on her way. She won’t listen in and won’t disturb us; we know how to be discreet.
JOURNALIST: You must have heard that you are no longer just saprophytes, tolerated until you give us a stomachache. You are now on the front pages of the newspapers: we even know how to take a sample of your DNA and replace it with different DNA and thus teach you to produce proteins that are useful to us. On this subject opinions differ. Some say it’s a good thing, and that, indeed, using this method we could even teach you bacteria to fix atmospheric nitrogen; others are afraid that you’ll learn too much and end up taking over.
E. COLI: Yes, yes, I am aware of this. In fact, one of my cousins to the 397th degree was operated on in this way, and she didn’t even suffer much—apart from the trauma of finding herself in a glass tube instead of in the warmth of an intestine. Well, I am a member of the prokaryote workers’ committee and, from the union’s point of view, we have no objections. The time for claims of equality is past: we, too, understand now that specialization is necessary, and useful to both parties. In fact, it’s been a while now since we went on strike, and I, as the union representative, believe that the strike is a blunt weapon at this point: the opposition has tools too powerful at its disposal. Politics is the art of the possible—one of my ancestors said that five hundred million years ago—and we are possibilist by nature, or actually opportunist. That’s exactly why you mustn’t underestimate us. You should follow my advice and guard your glass tubes carefully. Personally, I am good-natured, but I can’t vouch for my colleagues whose switchboards you have changed. Be careful: if an epidemic should break out you’ll be the ones to suffer, but so will we, who live in peace in your precious bowels. There’s no doubt that in the long run we would learn to adapt and survive even in the intestine of a cockroach or an oyster, but it would take time and effort and a good number of victims.
JOURNALIST: Thank you, ma’am. If you have nothing to add, I’d conclude here.
E. COLI: Well, that’s a good one! And the invention of the wheel, and of the asynchronous engine, what about that? It took you two hundred years, after you set up the first microscopes, to notice, but now our precedence is clear, and you come to me with your microphone without mentioning it? Believe me, that’s nerve. It’s the arrogance of you multicellular types, as if you had discovered everything yourselves!
JOURNALIST: I must beg your pardon. You see, we journalists have to deal with so many things, Craxi’s relay team, the health tax, Lebanon, Reagan’s blunder. . . .
E. COLI: So you don’t know anything about it? Listen, I’ll explain it in two minutes, so you won’t get it wrong in your piece. We have six flagella, okay? But we don’t move them the way one would a rope or a whip: we rotate them the way the rotor of a small electric motor rotates. For each flagellum we have a motor and a stator, and when we smell food the flagella become elongated coils; they position themselves almost like a tail, and push us forward, like a propeller. It’s simple, right? Then the ciliates arrived, with their stupid alternative motion, the wheel was forgotten, and it took two billion years for you to rediscover it. In essence you are ciliates, too: all your mucous membranes are ciliated, isn’t that so?
JOURNALIST: Thank you, this information is extremely interesting. You mean that if the ciliates hadn’t appeared, we’d be able to turn our heads all the way around, maybe ten times, without having to turn back the other way? And what about blood vessels, nerves, and all the rest? They would get all tangled up.
E. COLI: That’s your business, or, rather, evolution’s business. But your cars work well, and that’s exactly how they’re made. I mean, the fact is that you wasted an idea that you shouldn’t have overlooked. What a shame it’s too late to patent it.
“Imaginary Zoo: Natural Histories by Primo Levi,”
Airone, February 1987
The Seagull of Chivasso
JOURNALIST: Mr. Seagull, what are you doing here?
SEAGULL: Herring gull, if you please.
We are sedentary, the others, the ridibundi, or black-headed gulls, are vagabonds, opportunists without scruples.
JOURNALIST: Mr. Herring Gull, I feel I’ve met you before, but in a different setting: soaring over the surf—I don’t remember if it was at Cinque Terre or at Caprazoppa. But I do remember your fantastic glide, as you drifted in the wind, and then a sudden swoop down and right back up with a fish in your beak. I followed it all with my binoculars: I regretted not having a movie camera.
SEAGULL: You remember correctly—it was a mullet for my little ones. I had seen it from the air and I dove two meters under water to catch it. It was a good dive; I remember it, too. Eh, those were the days, but already by then mullets were becoming scarce. My wife and I had made ourselves an inaccessible nest, invisible, actually, right above the sea. It was a safe life: every foray meant a fish, some so big that I had trouble bringing them back to the nest, or even swallowing them. It was a worthy, noble profession for those who had good wings and a keen eye. Heavy seas couldn’t scare me; as a matter of fact, the bigger the storm, the more I felt that I owned the sky. I flew amid the lightning, when even your helicopters stayed on the ground, and I felt happy—“fulfilled,” as you would say.
JOURNALIST: Exactly: it was the right setting for a flier like you. But what led you to settle in Chivasso?1
SEAGULL: You know, rumors travel fast. A distant relative of mine lived in Chioggia,2 which wasn’t half bad; but then the water became scummy and stank of naphtha, and the fish became scarce. He and his wife flew up the Po River, in stages, all the way to Chivasso. As they went along, the water became less polluted. Well, years ago he came down to Liguria to tell me that Lancia is in Chivasso and is hiring lots of people.
JOURNALIST: There’s no doubt about that. But you can’t mean that Lancia also hires seagulls? Or is generous enough to provide for them?