Jump to Introduction + Chronology
Jump back to Previous: The Periodic Table - chapter 3
March 24, 2015
Not only does this relate to The Magic Mountain but it goes so nicely with Doctor Faustus as well. I only regret that I didn’t save my section on Mussolini (see Here). Maybe I will have to revise that.
p37 Night lay beyond the walls of the Chemical Institute, the night of Europe: Chamberlain had returned from Munich duped, Hitler had marched into Prague without firing a shot, Franco had subdued Barcelona and was ensconced in Madrid. Fascist Italy, the small-time pirate, had occupied Albania, and the premonition of imminent catastrophe condensed like grumous dew in the houses and streets, in wary conversations and dozing consciences.
But the night did not penetrate those thick walls; Fascist censorship itself, the regime’s masterwork, [Mussolini had been a member of the socialist press before the Great War and what he learned from that experience was not the virtue of freedom of the press but the necessity to control the press if you wanted to control people] kept us shut off from the world, in a white, anesthetized limbo. About thirty of us had managed to surmount the harsh barrier of the first exams and had been admitted to the second year’s Qualitative Analysis laboratory...
p38 ...here the affair had turned serious, the confrontation with Mother-Matter, our hostile mother, was tougher and closer. At two in the afternoon, Professor D., with his ascetic and distracted air, handed each of us precisely one gram of a certain powder: by the next day we had to complete the qualitative analysis, that is, report what metals and non-metals it contained. Report in writing, like a police report, only yes and no, because doubts and hesitations were not admissible: it was each time a choice, a deliberation, a mature and responsible undertaking, for which Fascism had not prepared us, and from which emanated a good smell, dry and clean.
Some elements, such as iron and copper, were easy and direct, incapable of concealment; others, such as bismuth and cadmium, were deceptive and elusive. There was a method, a toilsome, age-old plan for systematic research, a kind of combined steamroller and fine-toothed comb which nothing (in theory) could escape, but I preferred to invent each time a new road, with swift, extemporaneous forays, as in a war of movement, instead of the deadly grind of a war of position... One way or another, here the relationship with Matter changed, became dialectical: it was fencing, a face-to-face match. Two unequal opponents: on one side, putting the questions, the unfledged, unarmed chemist, at his elbow the textbook by Autenrieth [Dr. Wilhelm Autenrieth, apparently, about whom I can find very little except that he was a German chemist at the University of Freiburg] as his sole ally (because D., often called to help out in difficult cases, maintained a scrupulous neutrality, refused to give an opinion: a wise attitude, since whoever opens his mouth can put his foot in it, and professors are not supposed to do that); on the other side, responding with enigmas, stood Matter, with her sly passivity, ancient as the All and portentously rich in deceptions, as solemn and subtle as the Sphinx. I was just beginning to read German words and was enchanted by the word Urstoff (which means “element”: literally, “primal substance”) and by the prefix Ur which appeared in it and which in fact expresses ancient origin, remote distance in space and time. [As in Urfaust]
...
p39 Through the murk [of the poorly ventilated laboratory] and in the busy silence, we heard a Piedmontese voice say:... “I announce to you a great joy. We have iron.” It was march 1939, and a few days earlier an almost identical solemn announcement (“Habemus Papam”) had closed the conclave that had raised to Peter’s Throne Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, in whom many put their hopes, since one must after all put one’s hope in someone or something. The blasphemous announcement came from Sandro, the quiet one.
In our midst, Sandro was a loner, He was a boy of medium height, thin but muscular, who never wore an overcoat, even on the coldest days... He had large, calloused hands, rugged profile, a face baked by the sun, a low forehead beneath the line of his hair, which he wore very short and cut in a brush. He walked with the peasant’s long, slow stride.
p40 A few months before, [1938] the racial laws against the Jews had been proclaimed, and I too was becoming a loner. My Christian classmates were civil people; none of them, nor any of the teachers, had directed at me a hostile word or gesture, but I could feel them withdraw and, following an ancient pattern, I withdrew as well: every look exchanged between me and them was accompanied by a minuscule but perceptible flash of mistrust and suspicion. What do you think of me? What am I for you? The same as six months ago, your equal who does not go to Mass, or the Jew who, as Dante put it, “in your midst laughs at you”?
I had noticed with amazement and delight that something was happening between Sandro and me. It was not at all a friendship born of affinity; on the contrary, the difference in our origins made us rich in “exchangeable goods,” like two merchants who meet after coming from remote and mutually unknown regions. [a very bourgeois way of putting it] Nor was it the normal, portentous intimacy of twenty-year-olds: with Sandro I never reached this point. I soon realized that he was generous, subtle, tenacious, and brave, even with a touch of insolence, but he had an elusive, untamed quality; so that, although we were at the age when one always has the need, instinct, and immodesty of inflicting on one another everything that swarms in one’s head [Mann’s “straw-threshing” from Doctor Faustus?] and elsewhere (and this is an age that can last long, but ends with the first compromise), nothing had gotten through his carapace of reserve, nothing of his inner world, which nevertheless one felt was dense and fertile -- nothing save a few occasional, dramatically truncated hints. He had the nature of a cat with whom one can live for decades without ever being permitted to penetrate its sacred pelt.
We had many concessions to make to each other. I told him we were like cation and anion, but Sandro did not seem to acknowledge the comparison... He was the son of a mason and spent his summers working as a shepherd. Not a shepherd of souls: a shepherd of sheep, and not because of Arcadian rhetoric or eccentricity, but happily, out of love for the earth and grass and an abundance of heart. He had a curious mimetic talent, and when he talked about cows, chickens, sheep, and dogs he was transformed, imitating their way of looking, their movements and voices, becoming very gay and seemed to turn into an animal himself, like a shaman. He taught me about plants and animals, but said very little about his family... He was not interested in Catullus and Descartes, he was interested in being promoted, and spending Sunday on his skis and climbing rocks. He had chosen chemistry because he had thought it better than other studies; it was a trade that dealt with things one can see and touch, a way to earn one’s bread less tiring than working as a carpenter or a peasant.
p41 We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, [nature?] and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! That if one looked for the bridge, the missing link, between the world of words and the world of things, one did not have to look far: it was there, in our Autenrieth, in our smoke-filled labs, and in our future trade.
It would be hard to find a better spokesman for the “scientific” or “Socratic” (from Nietzsche) or “Mephistophelian” (from Goethe) view of existence that we’ve read so much deprecation of. That Turin was also Nietzsche’s base in Italy makes this even better.
p42 And finally, and fundamentally, an honest and open boy, did he not smell the stench of Fascist truths which tainted the sky? Did he not perceive it as an ignominy that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? Was he not filled with disgust at all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, all the imperatives? He did feel it; so then, how could he not feel a new dignity and majesty in our study, how could he ignore the fact that the chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidote to Fascism which he and I were seeking, because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness, like the radio and newspapers?
Sandro listened to me with ironical attention, always ready to deflate me with a couple of civil and terse words when I trespassed into rhetoric. But something was ripening in him (certainly not all my doing; those were months heavy with fateful events), something that troubled him because it was at once new and ancient... he began to study and his average shot up from C to A. At the same time, out of unconscious gratitude, and perhaps also out of a desire to get even, he in turn took an interest in my education and made it clear to me that it had gaps. I might even be right; it might be that Matter is our teacher and perhaps also, for lack of something better, our political school; but he had another form of matter to lead me to, another teacher: not the powders of the Analytical Lab but the true, authentic, timeless Urstoff, the rocks and ice of the nearby mountains. He proved to me without too much difficulty that I didn’t have the proper credentials to talk about matter. What commerce, what intimacy had I had, until then, with Empedocles’ four elements? Did I know how to light a stove? Wade across a torrent? Was I familiar with a storm high up in the mountains? The sprouting of seeds? No. So he too had something vital to teach me.
p43 A comradeship was born, and there began for me a feverish season. Sandro seemed to be made of iron, and he was bound to iron by an ancient kinship: his father’s fathers, he told me, had been tinkers (magnin) and blacksmiths in the Canavese valleys: they made nails on the charcoal forges, sheathed wagon wheels with red-hot hoops, pounded iron plates until deafened by the noise; and he himself when he saw the red vein of iron in the rock felt he was meeting a friend. [This is where non-fiction suffers. If Sandro were a fictional character he would not be associated with metallurgy -- man's first break with the natural order of things, our first infernal detour under the skin of the earth. Literally changing the substance of the world into new and un-natural things for our pleasure.] In the winter when it suddenly hit him, he would tie his skis on his rusty bike, leaving early in the morning and pedaling away until he reached the snow, without a cent, an artichoke in one pocket and the other full of lettuce; then he came back in the evening or even the next day, sleeping in haylofts, and the more storms and hunger he suffered the happier and healthier he was.
That final phrase “...the more storms and hunger he suffered the happier and healthier he was” is almost a statement of philosophy in itself. A few words on the bicycle. What we today recognize as a bicycle only took form in the 1890s and then, while Susan B. Anthony referred to it as a “freedom machine” it was only available to the elite. It wasn’t until a decade or two into the 20th century that the bicycle became accessible to the average person and even then it was quite primitive compared with what we rode in the 1970’s, for example. As a transportation technology the bicycle did much of what the automobile would later do at an even greater range. I mention this only to call attention to what would have been seen in the 19th century as the revolutionary mobility of Sandro on his bike, riding off to ski or climb mountains. Sandro’s day ski trip would have taken Nietzsche (even if his health had been up to it) many days on foot in the previous century.
I’m going to skip the lengthy section on rock climbing. In part because it isn’t crucial to the chapter, but also because rock climbing has always seemed pointless to me -- I admit and admire the skill required but I would rather hike around the rock face and flank the mountain instead of conquering it. I am reminded of what Mark Twain said about golf, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” I agree and feel the same way about rock climbing.
...
p45 To see Sandro in the mountains reconciled you to the world and made you forget the nightmare weighing on Europe. This was his place, what he had been made for, like the marmots whose whistle and snout he imitated: in the mountains he became happy, with a silent, infectious happiness, like a light that is switched on. He aroused a new communion with the earth and sky, into which flowed my need for freedom, the plenitude of my strength, and a hunger to understand the things he had pushed me toward. We would come out at dawn, rubbing our eyes, through the small door of the Martinotti bivouac, and there, all around us, barely touched by the sun, stood the white and brown mountains, new as if created during the night that had just ended and at the same time innumerably ancient. They were an island, an elsewhere.
You can search Martinotti bivouac yourself for endless images. I'm going to include a video of the park Martinotti is located in. Marmots are really the big thing there, apparently.
...
[After being stranded in the mountains overnight after an “easy” (according to the guide book) route turns into a nightmare,] p48 ...we went back down to the valley under our own steam; and to the innkeeper who asked us, with a snicker, how things had gone, and meanwhile was staring at our wild, exalted faces, we answered flippantly that we had had an excellent outing, then paid the bill and departed with dignity. This was it -- the bear meat; and now that many years have passed, I regret that I ate so little of it, for nothing has had, even distantly, the taste of that meat, which is the taste of being strong and free, free also to make mistakes and be the master of one’s destiny. That is why I am grateful to Sandro for having led me consciously into trouble, on that trip and other undertakings which were only apparently foolish, and I am certain that they helped me later on.
They didn’t help Sandro, or not for long. Sandro was Sandro Delmastro, the first man to be killed fighting in the Resistance with the Action Party’s Piedmontese Military Command. After a few months of extreme tension, in April of 1944 he was captured by the Fascists, did not surrender, and tried to escape from the Fascist Party house in Cuneo. He was killed with a tommygun burst in the back of the neck by a monstrous child-executioner, one of those wretched murderers of fifteen whom Mussolini's Republic of Salo recruited in the reformatories. His body was abandoned in the road for a long time, because the Fascists had forbidden the population to bury him.
Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments -- he who laughed at all monuments: he lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of him remains -- nothing but words, precisely.
Some people have closed shells and are socially inert. Other people, to the extent that they are like anions or cations, may be charismatic types that provide for people, who feel at a loss, that which they lack. A smoothly operating cult could be viewed as a nest of covalent bonds.
What interests me here is that iron, and this works perfectly with the way “iron” is used in this chapter, is initially produced in the furnace of just-about-to-die stars and then, to create usable iron and steel items, we again have to pass it through a blast furnace.
“An ion ... is an atom or molecule in which the total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons, giving the atom or molecule a net positive or negative electrical charge.
Ions can be created, by either chemical or physical means, via ionization. In chemical terms, if a neutral atom loses one or more electrons, it has a net positive charge and is known as a cation. If an atom gains electrons, it has a net negative charge and is known as an anion. An ion consisting of a single atom is an atomic or monatomic ion; if it consists of two or more atoms, it is a molecular or polyatomic ion. Because of their electric charges, cations and anions attract each other and readily form ionic compounds, such as salts.
In the case of physical ionization of a medium, such as a gas, what are known as "ion pairs" are created by ion impact, and each pair consists of a free electron and a positive ion.[2]” -Wiki
“In chemistry, a valence electron is an electron that is associated with an atom, and that can participate in the formation of a chemical bond; in a single covalent bond, both atoms in the bond contribute one valence electron in order to form a shared pair. The presence of valence electrons can determine the element's chemical properties and whether it may bond with other elements: For a main group element, a valence electron can only be in the outermost electron shell. In a transition metal, a valence electron can also be in an inner shell.
An atom with a closed shell of valence electrons (corresponding to an electron configuration s2p6) tends to be chemically inert. Atoms with one or two more valence electrons than are needed for a "closed" shell are highly reactive because the extra valence electrons are easily removed to form a positive ion. Atoms with one or two valence electrons fewer than are needed to form a closed shell are also highly reactive because of a tendency either to gain the missing valence electrons (thereby forming a negative ion), or to share valence electrons (thereby forming a covalent bond).
Like an electron in an inner shell, a valence electron has the ability to absorb or release energy in the form of a photon. An energy gain can trigger an electron to move (jump) to an outer shell; this is known as atomic excitation. Or the electron can even break free from its associated atom's valence shell; this is ionization to form a positive ion. When an electron loses energy (thereby causing a photon to be emitted), then it can move to an inner shell which is not fully occupied.” -Wiki
This is some basic chemistry and physics you will need to know -- or that at least will add to what you get from reading this book. Levi, above, compares people to “cations” and “anions.” This is perhaps just a fancy way of saying that opposites attract, but you can go even further than that if you consider what was said above about valence electrons.
Some people have closed shells and are socially inert. Other people, to the extent that they are like anions or cations, may be charismatic types that provide for people, who feel at a loss, that which they lack. A smoothly operating cult could be viewed as a nest of covalent bonds.
Iron (Fe 26)
“Its abundance in rocky planets like Earth is due to its abundant production by fusion in high-mass stars, where the production of nickel-56 (which decays to the most common isotope of iron) is the last nuclear fusion reaction that is exothermic. Consequently, radioactive nickel is the last element to be produced before the violent collapse of a supernova scatters precursor radionuclide of iron into space...
Crude iron metal is produced in blast furnaces, where ore is reduced by coke to pig iron, which has a high carbon content. Further refinement with oxygen reduces the carbon content to the correct proportion to make steel. ” -Wiki
What interests me here is that iron, and this works perfectly with the way “iron” is used in this chapter, is initially produced in the furnace of just-about-to-die stars and then, to create usable iron and steel items, we again have to pass it through a blast furnace.
No comments:
Post a Comment