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March 26, 2015
p61 I had in a drawer an illuminated parchment on which was written in elegant characters that one Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, had been conferred a degree in Chemistry summa cum laude. It was therefore a dubious document, half glory and half derision, half absolution and half condemnation. It had remained in that drawer since July 1941, and now we were at the end of November. The world was racing to catastrophe, and around me nothing was happening. The Germans had spread like a flood in Poland, Norway, Holland, France, and Yugoslavia and had penetrated the Russian steppes like a knife cutting through butter. The United States did not move to help the English, who remained alone. I could not find work and was wearing myself out looking for any sort of paid occupation; in the next room my father, prostrated by a tumor, was living his last months.
...
[Levi gets a mysterious and secret job at an asbestos mine. He and the “lieutenant” who is now in the army and who Levi is replacing at the mine travel to the site.]
p64 During the meal which, exceptionally, was offered to me on the office’s premises, the radio broadcast the news of the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor and Japan’s declaration of war on the United States. My fellow diners (a number of clerks, besides the lieutenant) greeted the announcement in various ways: some, and among these the lieutenant himself, with reserve and cautious glances at me; others, with worried comments; still others, belligerently insisting on the by now proven invincibility of the Japanese and German armies. [That seems a bit premature with regards to the Japanese as they had only faced the Chinese to this point in time]
So the “some place” had become localized in space, without however, losing any of its magic. Yes, all mines are magical per se, and always have been. The entrails of the earth swarm with gnomes, kobalds (cobalt!), nickel, German “little demon” or “sprite,” and from which we derive the word nickel, creatures who can be generous and let you find a treasure beneath the tip of your pickax, or deceive and bedazzle you, making modest pyrites glitter like gold, or disguising zinc in the garb of tin: and in fact, many are the minerals whose names have roots that signify “deception, fraud, bedazzlement.”
[They had been mining here for years to extract the 2% asbestos and dumping thousands of tons of the resulting waste down the side of the valley. Levi’s job is to find something in these tailings that can be extracted profitably -- for instance nickel. Along the way Levi hears the local stories: like the story of Signor Pistamiglio who instructed his very clever German shepherd how to steal the best of the turkeys raised by his neighbors.]
p71 I fell in love with my work from the very first day, although it entailed nothing more at that stage than quantitative analysis of rock samples... the sample to be analyzed was no longer an anonymous, manufactured powder, a material quiz: it was a piece of rock, the earth’s entrail, torn from the earth by the explosive’s force; and on the basis of the daily data of the analysis little by little was born a map, the portrait of the subterranean veins. For the first time after seventeen years of schoolwork, of Greek verbs and the history of the Peloponnesian War, the things I had learned were beginning to be useful to me...
The girl in the lab [his assistant] was called Alida. She watched my neophyte’s enthusiasms without sharing them; she was in fact surprised and somewhat annoyed. Her presence was not unpleasant. She was a liceo graduate, quoted Pindar and Sappho, the daughter of a completely innocuous small local Fascist official, was cunning and slothful, and didn’t give a damn about anything, least of all the analysis of rock, which she had learned to perform mechanically from the lieutenant... I had hard work convincing her that it was not quite the thing to pad the results of analysis: something she tended to do... she said, it didn’t cost anybody anything, and pleased the director, the lieutenant, and myself.
p72 ...After some weeks I realized that I was no longer a nameless person: I was a certain Doctor Levi who must not be called Levi, neither in the second nor the third person, due to good manners, and in order to avoid a mess. In the mine’s gossipy and easygoing atmosphere, a disparity between my indeterminate state as an outcast and my visible mildness of manner leaped to the eye, and -- Alida admitted this to me -- was lengthily discussed and variously interpreted: I was everything from an agent of the OVRA, the Fascist secret police, to someone with high-class connections.
p73 ...Sometimes I stayed in the lab past quitting time or went back there after dinner to study, or to meditate on the problem of nickel. At other times I shut myself in to read Mann’s Joseph stories in my monastic cell... On nights when the moon was up I often took long solitary walks through the wild countryside around the mine...
These roamings granted me a truce from the grim awareness of my father dying in Turin, of the American defeats at Bataan, the German victories in the Crimea, in short, of the open trap which was about to spring shut: it gave birth in me to a new bond, more sincere than the rhetoric about nature learned at school, with those brambles and stones which were my island and my freedom, a freedom I would perhaps soon lose.
...
p74 ...At moments of weariness I perceived the rock that encircled me, the green serpentine of the Alpine foothills, [similar, I believe, to our local rocks around SF] in all its sidereal, hostile, extraneous hardness: in comparison, the trees of the valley, by now already dressed for spring, were like us, also people who do not speak but feel the heat and the frost, enjoy and suffer, are born and die, fling out pollen with the wind, obscurely follow the sun in its travels. Not the rock: it does not house any energy, it is extinguished since primordial times, pure hostile passivity; a massive fortress that I had to pull down bastion by bastion to get my hands on the hidden sprite, the capricious kupfernickel [see bottom] which jumps out now here, now there, elusive and malign, with long perked ears, always ready to flee from the blows of the investigating pickax, leaving you with nothing to show for it.
p75 But this is no longer the time of sprites, nickel, and kobolds. We are chemists, that is, hunters: ours are “the town experiences of adult life” of which Pavese [Here?] spoke, success and failure, to kill the white whale or wreck the ship; one should not surrender to incomprehensible matter, one must not just sit down... nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence; we must circle around it, pierce and probe it, look for the opening or make it...
...Metallic nickel, like iron, is magnetic, and therefore, according to this hypothesis, it would have been easy to separate it from the rest, alone or with the iron, simply by means of a small magnet... [this doesn’t work] ...the nickel, together with the iron, must be firmly lodged in the serpentine’s structure, combined with the silicate and water, satisfied (so to speak) with its state and averse to assuming another.
...
p76 There is nothing more vivifying than a hypothesis... I set to work like a whirlwind. In a moment the apparatus was mounted, the thermostat set for 800 degrees centigrade, the pressure regulator on the tank set, the fluxmeter [Here?] put in order. I heated the material for half an hour, then reduced the temperature and passed the hydrogen through for another hour: by now it was dark... I felt part conspirator, part alchemist.
When the time came, I took the porcelain boat out of the quartz tube, let it cool off in the vacuum, then dispersed in water the powder, which had turned from greenish to a dirty yellow: a thing which seemed to me a good sign. I picked up the magnet and set to work. Each time I took the magnet out of the water, it brought with it a tuft of brown powder: I removed it delicately with filter paper and put it aside, perhaps a milligram each time; for the analysis to be well-founded at least a half gram of material was needed, that is, several hours work. I decided to stop about midnight: to interrupt the separation, I mean to say, because at no cost would I have put off the beginning of the analysis. For this, since it involved a magnetic fraction (and therefore presumably poor in silicates), and yielding to my haste, I there and then tried a simplified variant. At three in the morning I had the result: no longer the usual pink little cloud of nickel-dimethylglyoxime but rather a visibly abundant precipitate. Filtered, washed, dried, and weighed. The final datum appeared to me written in letters of fire on the slide rule: 6 percent of nickel [up from .2], the rest iron. A victory: even without a further separation, an alloy to be sent to the electric oven as is...
p77 I was thinking of having opened a door with a key, and of possessing the key to many doors, perhaps to all of them. I was thinking of having thought of something that nobody else had yet thought... and I felt invincible and untouchable even when faced by close enemies, closer each month. Finally, I was thinking of having had a far from ignoble revenge on those who had declared be biologically inferior.
I was not thinking that if the method of extraction I had caught sight of could have found industrial application, the nickel produced would have entirely ended up in Fascist Italy’s and Hitler Germany’s armor plate and artillery shells... I did not foresee that my interpretation of the magnetic separation of nickel was substantially mistaken, as the lieutenant showed me a few days later...
He says that even “today” people on the border of chemistry and white magic still are trying to find some way to extract wealth from the mountain of sterile stone thrown away at that mine.
Something about the ending of this chapter made me think of Richard Feynman and I've confirmed that Levi is just over a year younger than Feynman. At this point in the war, Feynman was about a year from moving to Los Alamos to work on the Bomb. If Feynman got a chapter in this book it would have to be titled "Uranium" -- and would easily bump the chapter that already has that name.
Nickel (Ni 28)
“In medieval Germany, a red mineral was found in the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) that resembled copper ore. However, when miners were unable to extract any copper from it, they blamed a mischievous sprite of German mythology, Nickel (similar to Old Nick), for besetting the copper. They called this ore Kupfernickel from the German Kupfer for copper.[32][33][34][35] This ore is now known to be nickeline or niccolite, a nickel arsenide. In 1751, Baron Axel Fredrik Cronstedt was trying to extract copper from kupfernickel—and instead produced a white metal that he named after the spirit that had given its name to the mineral, nickel.[36] In modern German, Kupfernickel or Kupfer-Nickel designates the alloy cupronickel.
After its discovery, the only source for nickel was the rare Kupfernickel but, from 1824 on, nickel was obtained as a byproduct of cobalt blue production. [I think this is our first dye or pigment -- a pigment in this case.] The first large-scale producer of nickel was Norway, which exploited nickel-rich pyrrhotite from 1848 on. The introduction of nickel in steel production in 1889 increased the demand for nickel, and the nickel deposits of New Caledonia, [New Caledonia was at this time a Free French colony and Nouméa, the capital, was the most important forward base in the Southwest Pacific for the U.S. Navy. As the Solomon's Campaign slowly progressed, the Navy would push its bases ever farther to the east and north. The next base up the line would be Espiritu Santo on the north end of what is now Vanuatu -- the site of recent devastation caused by cyclone Pam. There is still an active cargo cult in Vanuatu dating from WW2.] which were discovered in 1865, provided most of the world's supply between 1875 and 1915. The discovery of the large deposits in the Sudbury Basin, Canada, in 1883, in Norilsk-Talnakh, Russia, in 1920, and in the Merensky Reef, South Africa, in 1924 made large-scale production of nickel possible.[31]” -Wiki
Elsewhere
The premise of the novel Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin is that after you die you age backwards until you hit 0 and are reborn back on earth. My father died 16 years ago this week so in a week we would, if the eschatology of Elsewhere was reality, both be 63. This is the age he was, in reality, in 1983 when we had almost nothing but a shared history in common. Would we, after his growing fairly old and dying, have more in common? I rather doubt it. In my experience, people don't really change. So I imagine him being happy to be able to eat and drink what he wants (probably smoking again, as well) and delighted that his golf game is improving rather than slowly worsening. Perhaps I'm wrong.
Equally strange is the thought that in 2031, 16 years from now, I will be the age he was when he died. 2031 is, curiously, about the time we should be faced with repainting this building (that we just painted last year). On the one hand, it doesn't seem that far away. On the other hand, the thought of not having to deal with that hassle again rather appeals to me.
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