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March 23, 2015
p29 For five months we had attended, packed together like sardines and full of reverence, Professor P.'s classes in General and Inorganic Chemistry, carrying away from them varied sensations, but all of them exciting and new. No, P.'s chemistry was not the motor-force of the Universe, nor the key to the Truth: P. was a skeptical, ironic old man, the enemy of all forms of rhetoric (for this reason, and only for this, he was an anti-Fascist), intelligent, obstinate, and quick-witted with a sad sort of wit...
p32 Caselli loved P. with a bitter, polemical love. Apparently he had been faithful to him for forty years; he was his shadow, his earthbound incarnation, and, like all those who perform vicarial functions, he was an interesting human specimen: like those, I mean to say, who represent Authority without possessing any of their own, such as for example, sacristans, museum guides, beadles, nurses, and “young men” working for lawyers and notaries, and salesmen. These people, to a greater or lesser degree, tend to transfuse the human substance of their chief into their own mold, as occurs with pseudomorphic crystals: sometimes they suffer from it, often they enjoy it...
p33 The first day it was my fate to be assigned the preparation of zinc sulfate: it should not have been too difficult; it was a matter of making an elementary stoichiometric calculation and attacking the zinc particles with previously diluted sulfuric acid: concentrate, crystallize, dry with the pump, wash and recrystallize. Zinc, Zinck, zinco; they make tubs out of it for laundry, it is not an element which says much to the imagination, it is gray and its salts are colorless, it is not toxic, nor does it produce striking chromatic reactions; in short, it is a boring metal. It has been known to humanity [outside India!] for two or three centuries, so it is not a veteran covered with glory like copper, nor even of those newly minted elements which are still surrounded with the glamour of their discovery.
Caselli handed me my zinc; I returned to the bench and prepared to work: I felt curious, shy, and vaguely annoyed, as when you reach thirteen and must go to the temple to recite in Hebrew the Bar Mitzvah prayer before the rabbi; the moment, desired and somewhat feared, had come. The hour of the appointment with Matter, the Spirit’s great antagonist, had struck: hyle, which, strangely, can be found embalmed in the endings of alkyl radicals: methyl, butyl, etc...
The course notes contained a detail which at first reading had escaped me, namely, that the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered to consider the second, which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you are not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable. So take the solution of copper sulfate which is in the shelf of reagents, add a drop of it to your sulfuric acid, and you’ll see the reaction begin: the zinc wakes up, it is covered with a white fur of hydrogen bubbles, and there you are, the enchantment has taken place, you can leave it to its fate and take a stroll around the lab and see what’s new and what the others are doing...
p34 In one corner there was a hood, and Rita sat in front of it. I went over to her and realized with fleeting pleasure that she was cooking the same dish: with pleasure, I say, because for some time now I had been hanging around Rita, mentally preparing brilliant conversational openings, and then at the decisive moment I did not dare come out with them and put it off to the next day. I did not dare because of my deep-rooted shyness and lack of confidence, and also because Rita discouraged all contact, it was hard to understand why. She was very thin, pale, sad, and sure of herself: she got through the exams with good marks, but without the genuine appetite that I felt for the things she had to study. She was nobody’s friend, no one knew anything about her, she said very little, and for all these reasons she attracted me; I tried to sit next to her in class and she did not take me into her confidence, and I felt frustrated and challenged. In fact I was desperate, and surely not for the first time; actually at that time I thought myself condemned to a perpetual masculine solitude, denied a woman’s smile forever, which I nevertheless needed as much as air.
p35 It was quite clear that on that day I was being presented with an opportunity that should not be wasted: at that moment between Rita and myself there was a bridge, a small zinc bridge, fragile but negotiable; come on now, take the first step.
Buzzing around Rita, I became aware of a second fortunate circumstance: a familiar book jacket, yellowish with a red border, stuck out of the girl’s bag; the image was a raven with a book in its beak. The title? You could read only IC and TAIN, but that’s all I needed: it was my sustenance during those months, the timeless story of Hans Castorp in enchanted exile on the magic mountain. I asked Rita about it, on tenterhooks to hear her opinion, as if I had written the book: and soon enough I had to realize that she was reading the novel in an entirely different way. As a novel, in fact: she was very interested in finding out exactly how far Hans would go with Madame Chauchat, and mercilessly skipped the fascinating (for me) political, theological, and metaphysical discussions between the humanist Settembrini and the Jewish Jesuit Naphtha.
And now you see why I am doing this book. I pity anyone who innocently brings up in conversation (within my hearing) an interest in The Magic Mountain. I could easily give Bill Bryson’s “Most boring man in the world” (the trainspotter) a run for his title.
Never mind: actually it’s ground for debate. It could even become an essential and fundamental discussion, [this reminds me of the wonderfully Fanny Price like heroine in the movie Metropolitan who, not surprisingly, adores the character Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Once one got over the shock at the thought that there were such people in the world, it would at least be a sure topic for intense conversation. ] because I too am Jewish, and she is not: I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt or mustard. Impurity, certainly, since just during those months the publication of the magazine Defense of the Race [but see also Here. In this particular context it is interesting to note that Mussolini argued that the mixture of racial elements in Mediterranean Aryans improved them. ] had begun, and there was much talk about purity, and I had begun to be proud of being impure. In truth, until precisely those months it had not meant much to me that I was a Jew: within myself, and in my contacts with my Christian friends, I had always considered my origin as an almost negligible but curious fact, a small amusing anomaly, like having a crooked nose or freckles; a Jew is somebody who at Christmas does not have a tree, who should not eat salami but eats it all the same, who has learned a bit of Hebrew at thirteen and then has forgotten it. According to the above-mentioned magazine, a Jew is stingy and cunning; but I was not particularly stingy or cunning, nor had my father been.
One of the mysteries of WW2 is how little the Axis Powers planned and cooperated with each other. I suspect one reason must have been that they each saw themselves as ethnically superior to the others -- I know this was true of the Germans and Japanese -- or else suspected the others saw them as inferior -- this was certainly true of the Italians.
p36 So there was plenty to discuss with Rita, but the conversation I had in mind didn’t strike a spark. I soon realized that Rita was different from me: she was not a grain of mustard; she was the daughter of a poor, sickly storekeeper. For her the university was not at all the temple of Knowledge: it was a thorny and difficult path which let to a degree, a job, and regular pay. She herself had worked since childhood: she had helped her father, had been a salesgirl in a village store, and had also ridden about Turin on a bicycle, making deliveries and picking up payments. All this did not put a distance between us; on the contrary I found it admirable, like everything that was part of her: her not very well cared for, rough-looking hands, her modest dress, her steady gaze, her concrete sadness, the reserve with which she accepted my remarks.
So my zinc sulfate ended up badly by concentrating, turned into nothing more than a bit of white powder which in suffocating clouds exhaled all or almost all of its sulfuric acid. I left it to its fate and asked Rita to let me walk her home. It was dark, and her home was not close by. The goal that I had set myself was objectively modest, but it seemed to me incomparably audacious: I hesitated half of the way and felt on burning coals, and intoxicated myself and her with disjointed, breathless talk. Finally, trembling with emotion, I slipped my arm under hers. Rita did not pull away, nor did she return the pressure: but I fell into step with her, and felt exhilarated and victorious. It seemed to me that I had won a small but decisive battle against the darkness, the emptiness, and the hostile years that lay ahead.
I don’t know what is sadder, Levi realizing his “Clavdia” does not share his (our) passion for The Magic Mountain or poor Rita reading all that for the romance -- which is almost like a trace impurity in the book. I imagine her scanning the chapters following the death of Peeperkorn looking, in vain, for any mention of Madame Chauchat.
Zinc (Zn 30)
"Zinc metal was not produced on a large scale until the 12th century in India and was unknown to Europe until the end of the 16th century. The mines of Rajasthan have given definite evidence of zinc production going back to 6th century BC.[4] To date, the oldest evidence of pure zinc comes from Zawar, in Rajasthan, as early as the 9th century AD when a distillation process was employed to make pure zinc.[5] Alchemists burned zinc in air to form what they called "philosopher's wool" or "white snow".
The element was probably named by the alchemist Paracelsus after the German word Zinke [prong?]. German chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf is credited with discovering pure metallic zinc in 1746. Work by Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta uncovered the electrochemical properties of zinc by 1800. Corrosion-resistant zinc plating of iron (hot-dip galvanizing) is the major application for zinc. Other applications are in batteries, small non-structural castings, and alloys, such as brass. A variety of zinc compounds are commonly used, such as zinc carbonate and zinc gluconate (as dietary supplements), zinc chloride (in deodorants), zinc pyrithione (anti-dandruff shampoos),zinc sulfide (in luminescent paints), and zinc methyl or zinc diethyl in the organic laboratory." -Wiki
Note: The Chronology in the Introduction is now updated to include Primo Levi related dates. Also more WW2 dates especially ones relating to the Italian participation in the war.
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