63. The Periodic Table - chapter 11 - Cerium

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March 31, 2015

p139 At a distance of thirty years I find it difficult to reconstruct the sort of human being that corresponded, in November 1944, to my name or, better, to my number: 174517. I must have by then overcome the most terrible crisis, the crisis of having become part of Lager system, and I must have developed a strange callousness if I then managed not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to perform rather delicate work, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death and at the same time brought to a frenzy by the approach of the Russian liberators, who by now were only eighty kilometers away. Desperation and hope alternated at a rate that would have destroyed almost any normal person in an hour.

p140 We were not normal because we were hungry. Our hunger at that time had nothing in common with the well-known (and not completely disagreeable) sensation of someone who has missed a meal and is certain that the next meal will not be missed: it was a need, a lack, a yearning that had accompanied us now for a year, had struck deep, permanent roots in us, lived in our cells, and conditioned our behavior. To eat, to get something to eat, was our prime stimulus, behind which, at a great distance, followed all other problems of survival, and even farther away the memories of home and the very fear of death.

I was a chemist in a chemical plant, in a chemical laboratory (this too has been narrated), and I stole in order to eat. If you do not begin as a child, learning how to steal is not easy; it had taken me several months before I could repress the moral commandments and acquire the necessary techniques, and at a certain point I realized (with a flash of laughter and a pinch of satisfied ambition) that I was reliving -- me, a respectable little university graduate -- the involuntary-evolution of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian, Darwinian dog who is deported and becomes a thief in order to live in his Klondike Lager -- the great Buck of The Call of the Wild. I stole like him and like the foxes: at every favorable opportunity but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. I stole everything except the bread of my companions.

[His problem is that most of the substances that he could steal in the lab are liquids] ...This is the great problem of packaging, which every experienced chemist knows: and it was well known to God Almighty, who solved it brilliantly, as he is wont to, with cellular membranes, eggshells, the multiple peel of oranges, and our own skins, because after all we too are liquids. Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptible, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptible things. [See Doctor Faustus]

[With all this in mind he has to limit himself to items that were]

p141 ...solid, not perishable, not cumbersome, and above all new. It had to be of high unitary value, that is not voluminous, because we were often searched at the camp’s entrance after work; and it should finally be useful to or desired by at least one of the social categories that composed the Lager’s complicated universe.

...

[Levy finds some iron-cerium rods and managed to get them into the camp where he consults with his friend, Alberto. Levi is skeptical of the value of these rods] p142 Alberto reproached me. For him renunciation, pessimism discouragement were abominable and culpable: he did not accept the concentration camp universe, he rejected it both instinctively and with his reason, and he did not let himself be tainted by it. He was a man of good and strong will, and miraculously he had remained free, and his words and his acts were free: he had not bowed his head, he had not bent his back. A gesture of his, a word, a smile had a liberating virtue, they were a rip in the rigid fabric of the Lager, and all those who had contact with him felt this, even those who did not understand his language. I believe that nobody, in that place, was loved as much as he was.

p143 He reproached me: you should never be disheartened, because it is harmful and therefore immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: good, now it’s a matter of launching it. He would take care of it, he would turn it into a novelty, an article of high commercial value. Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.

I love this twist on the story of Prometheus. It is also quintessentially “Jewish” or, at least, bourgeois -- and for many of these authors (Ford Madox Ford, leaps to mind) those two things seem to be almost the same thing. Of course the world of the camps would also be a world of “trade” as are all human environments. People who reject trade on principle (Marxists and Religious people for the most part) usually, to the extent that they are successful in imposing their beliefs, often create new (black or underground) markets as a side-effect. And then even the true-believers often fall victim to temptation and greed through the operation of these markets.

It’s also worth noting that Alberto here (a man of trade, apparently, though we know little else about him) voices (see bold text above) an anti-nihilist philosophy not unlike that of Sartre. But unlike Foucault, Alberto asserts both his humanity and his freedom. A child of the haute bourgeoisie, and with the lessons of the Holocaust just behind him, Foucault embraced a far more pessimistic philosophy and view of the world than did someone actually living in Auschwitz.

We must be more astute. This speech, about the necessity of being astute, was not new between us; Alberto had often made it to me, and before him others in the free world, and still many others repeated it to me later, an infinite number of times down to today, with a modest result; indeed, with the paradoxical result of developing in me a dangerous tendency of symbiosis with a truly astute person, who obtained (or felt he obtained) temporal or spiritual advantages from his companionship with me. Alberto was an ideal symbiont, because he refrained from being astute at my expense. I did not know, but he did... that in the plant there was a clandestine industry of cigarette lighters: unknown craftsmen, at spare moments, made them for important persons and civilian workers. Now flints are needed for lighters, and they had to be of a certain size: we had to thin down the rods I had...

...

...According to Alberto, the price of a lighter flint was equivalent to a ration of bread, that is, one day of life... [and they could make 120 flints] two months of life for me and two for Alberto, and in two months the Russians would have arrived and liberated us; and finally cerium would have liberated us, an element about which I knew nothing, save for that single practical application, and that it belonged to the equivocal and heretical rare-earth group family [Promethium is another rare-earth element], and that... it was not named after its discoverer; instead it celebrates (great modesty of the chemist of past times!) the asteroid Ceres, since the metal and the star were discovered in the same year, 1801; [not quite true -- see notes below] and this was perhaps an affectionate-ironic homage to alchemical couplings: just as the Sun was gold and Mars iron, so Ceres must be cerium.

...

One always hesitates to judge foolhardy actions, [in this case scraping the rods to reduce them in size -- creating sparks -- while concealed under blankets on a bed of shavings at night] whether one’s own or those of others, after they have proven to be successful: perhaps therefore they were not foolhardy enough? Or perhaps it is true that there exists a God who protects children, fools, and drunks? [Let’s not think too hard about that one in this particular situation] Or perhaps again these actions have more weight and more warmth than those innumerable other actions that have ended badly, and one tells them more willingly? But we did not ask ourselves such questions: the Lager had given us a crazy familiarity with danger and death, and risking the noose to eat more seemed to us a logical, indeed an obvious choice.

...

p146 We worked for three nights: nothing happened, nobody noticed our activity, nor did the blanket or pallet catch fire, and this is how we won the bread which kept us alive until the arrival of the Russians and how we comforted each other in the trust and friendship which united us.  

Levi tells the story of his liberation elsewhere. Alberto was moved with a large portion of the prisoners to Buchenwald and Mauthausen and disappeared somewhere along the way.

He doesn’t mention it here, but Levi was saved in the end because he contracted scarlet fever and was too ill to move when the SS evacuated the camp. Thus he survived the Resistenza because he was Jewish and he survived the Holocaust because he was ill at just the right moment. “So it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut might say.

Cerium (Ce 58)  

“Commercial applications of cerium are numerous. They include catalysts, additives to fuel to reduce emissions and to glass and enamels to change their color. Cerium oxide is an important component of glass polishing powders and phosphors used in screens and fluorescent lamps. It is also used in the "flint" (actually ferrocerium) of lighters.”

...

“Cerium metal is highly pyrophoric, meaning that when it is ground or scratched, the resulting shavings catch fire.[9]”

...

“Cerium was discovered in Bastnäs in Sweden by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger, and independently in Germany by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, both in 1803.[17] Cerium was named by Berzelius after the dwarf planet Ceres, discovered two years earlier (1801).[12] As originally isolated, cerium was in the form of its oxide, and was named ceria, a term that is still used. The metal itself was too electropositive to be isolated by then-current smelting technology, a characteristic of rare earth metals in general. After the development of electrochemistry by Humphry Davy five years later, the earths soon yielded the metals they contained. Ceria, as isolated in 1803, contained all of the lanthanides present in the cerite ore from Bastnäs, Sweden, and thus only contained about 45% of what is now known to be pure ceria. It was not until Carl Gustaf Mosander succeeded in removing lanthana and "didymia" in the late 1830s, that ceria was obtained pure. Wilhelm Hisinger was a wealthy mine owner and amateur scientist, and sponsor of Berzelius. He owned or controlled the mine at Bastnäs, and had been trying for years to find out the composition of the abundant heavy gangue rock (the "Tungsten of Bastnäs"), now known as cerite, that he had in his mine.[12] Mosander and his family lived for many years in the same house as Berzelius, and Mosander was undoubtedly persuaded by Berzelius to investigate ceria further.[18]” -Wiki

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62. The Periodic Table - chapter 10 - Gold

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March 30, 2015

p127 It is well known that people from Turin transplanted to Milan do not strike root, or at least do it badly. In the fall of 1942 there were seven of us friends from Turin, boys and girls, living in Milan, having arrived for different reasons in the large city which the war had rendered inhospitable; our parents -- those of us who still had them -- had moved to the country to avoid the bombings, [The RAF started bombing Italian cities early in the war and were joined by the U.S.A.A.F. in 1942] and we were living an amply communal life. Euge was an architect, he wanted to do Milan over, and declared that the best city planner had been Frederick Barbarossa. Silvio had a law degree, but he was writing a philosophical treatise on minuscule sheets of onionskin and had a job with a shipping company. Ettore was an engineer at Olivetti’s. Lina was sleeping with Euge and had some vague involvement with art galleries. Vanda was a chemist like me but could not find a job, and was permanently irritated by this because she was a feminist. Ada was my cousin and worked at the Corbacco Publishing House; Silvio called her the bi-doctor because she had two degrees, and Euge called her cousimo, which meant cousin of Primo, which Ada rather resented. After Guilia’s marriage, I had remained alone with my rabbits; I felt a widower and an orphan and fantasized about writing the saga of an atom of carbon, to make people understand the solemn poetry, known only to chemists, of chlorophyll photosynthesis...

p128 If I am not mistaken we were all writing poetry, except for Ettore, who said it was undignified for an engineer. Writing sad, crepuscular poems, and not all that beautiful, while the world was in flames, did not seem to us either strange or shameful: we proclaimed ourselves the enemies of Fascism, but actually Fascism had had its effect on us, as on almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical.

We bore with spiteful gaiety the rationing and the freezing cold in houses without coal, and we accepted with irresponsibility the nightly bombings by the English; they were not for us, they were a brutal sign of force on the part of our very distant allies, they didn’t bother us. We thought what all humiliated Italians were then thinking: that the Germans and Japanese were invincible, but the Americans were too, and that the war would plod on like this for another twenty or thirty years, a bloody and interminable but remote stalemate, known only through doctored war bulletins, and sometimes, in certain of my contemporaries’ families, through funereal, bureaucratic letters which spoke such words as “heroically, in the fulfillment of his duty.” The danse macabre up and down the Libyan coast [the battle between the British in Egypt and the Italians and Germans based in Libya], back and forth on the steppes of the Ukraine, would never come to an end.

Each of us did his or her work day by day, slackly, without believing in it, as happens to someone who knows he is not working for his own future. We went to the theater and concerts, which sometimes were interrupted halfway through because the air-raid siren would start shrieking: and this seemed to us a ridiculous and gratifying incident; the Allies were masters of the sky, perhaps in the end they would win and Fascism would end -- but it was their business, they were rich and powerful, they had the airplane carriers and the Liberators [the U.S. B-24 "Liberator" heavy bomber. The longest range heavy bomber of this phase of the war]. But not us, “they” had declared us “different,” and different we would be; we took sides but kept out of the stupid and cruel Aryan games, discussing the plays of O’Neill and Thornton Wilder, climbing the Grigne slopes, falling a bit in love with each other, inventing intellectual games, and singing the lovely songs Silvio had learned from some of his Waldensian friends. As to what was happening during those same months in all of Europe occupied by the Germans, in Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, in the pit of Babi Yar near Kiev, in the ghetto of Warsaw, in Salonica, Paris, and Lidice: as to this pestilence which was about to submerge us no precise information had reached us, only vague and sinister hints dropped by soldiers returning from Greece or from the rear areas of the Russian front, and which we tended to censor. Our ignorance allowed us to live, as when you are in the mountains and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don’t know it and feel safe.

p129 But in November came the Allied landing in North Africa, in December came the Russian resistance and finally victory at Stalingrad, and we realized that the war had drawn closer and that history had resumed its march. In the space of a few weeks each of us matured, more so than during the previous twenty years. Out of the shadows came men whom Fascism had not crushed -- lawyers, professors, and workers -- and we recognized in them our teachers, those for whom we had futilely searched until then in the Bible’s doctrine, in chemistry, and on the mountains. Fascism had reduced them to silence for twenty years, and they explained to us that Fascism was not only a clownish and improvident misrule but the negator of justice; it had not only dragged Italy into an unjust and ill-omened war, but it had arisen and consolidated itself as the custodian of a detestable legality and order, based on the coercion of those who work, on the unchecked profits of those who exploit the labor of others, on the silence imposed on those who think and do not want to be slaves, and on systemic and calculated lies. They told us that our mocking, ironic intolerance was not enough; it should turn into anger, and the anger should be channeled into a well-organized and timely revolt, but they did not teach us how to make bombs or shoot a rifle.

p130 They talked to us about unknowns: Gramsci, Salvemini, Gobetti, the Rosselli brothers -- who were they? So there actually existed a second history, a history parallel to the one which the liceo had administered to us from on high? In those few convulsed months we tried in vain to reconstruct, repopulate the historic black of the past twenty years, but those new characters remained “heroes,” like Garibaldi and Nazario Sauro, they did not have thickness or human substance. The time to consolidate our education was not granted us: in March came the strikes in Turin, indicating that the crisis was near at hand; on July 25 came the internal collapse of Fascism, the piazzas jammed with happy, fraternal crowds, the spontaneous and precarious joy of a country to which liberty had been given by a palace intrigue; and then came the eighth of September, the gray-green serpent of Nazi divisions on the streets of Milan and Turin, the brutal reawakening: the comedy was over, Italy was an occupied country, like Poland, Yugoslavia, and Norway.

In this way, after the long intoxication with words, certain of our rightness of our choice, extremely insecure about our means, our hearts filled with much more desperation than hope, and against the backdrop of a defeated, divided country, we went into battle to test our strength. We separated to follow our destinies, each in a different valley.

Levi’s tiny resistance band is quickly captured by the militia of the Republic of Salo thanks to an informer. Before Levi is turned over to the Germans and transported to the camps, he has a conversation about gold with a local arrested for contraband.

p136 “You know why it’s called the Dora?” ... “Because it’s made of gold. Not all, of course, but it carries gold, and when it freezes over you can no longer take it out.”

“Is there gold on the bottom?”

“Yes, in the sand: not everywhere, but in many stretches... Our particular bend, which we have passed down from father to son, is the richest of all: it is well hidden, very much out-of-the-way...”

...

“...You see, it’s not that there is so much gold: there is in fact very little, you wash it for a whole night and you manage to get two or three grams out of it: but it never ends. You can go back when you wish: the next night or a month later, whenever you feel like it, and the gold has grown back, and it’s that way forever and ever, like grass comes back in the fields. And so there are no people who are freer than us: that’s why I feel I’m going crazy, staying inside here.

...

p 137 “Not all days are good: it goes better when the weather is good and the moon in its last quarter. I couldn’t say why, but that’s how it is, in case it ever should occur to you to try.”

I appreciated the good omen in silence. Of course I would try it: What wouldn’t I try? During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly, and I felt time running through my fingers, escaping from my body minute by minute, like a hemorrhage that can no longer be stanched. Of course I would search for gold: not to get rich but to try out a new skill, to see again the earth, air, and water from which I was separated by a gulf that grew larger every day; and to find again my chemical trade in its essential and primordial form, the Scheidekunst, precisely, the art of separating metal from gangue.

“I don’t sell it all,” the man continued. “I am too fond of it. I keep a little on the side and melt it down, twice a year, and work it: I am not an artist but I like to have it in my hands, hit it with the hammer, score it, scratch it, I’m not interested in getting rich; what counts for me is to live free, not to have a collar like a dog, to work like this, when I wish, and nobody who can come and say, ‘Come on, get moving.’ That’s why I hate staying in here; besides, on top of everything else, you lose a day’s work.”

...

p138 [Back] In the cell I was welcomed by the solitude, the freezing, pure breath of the mountains which came through the small window, and the anguish of tomorrow. I listened -- in the silence of curfew one could hear the murmur of the Dora, lost friend, and all friends were lost, and youth and joy, and perhaps life: it flowed close by but indifferent, dragging along the gold in its womb of melted ice. I felt gripped by a painful envy of my ambiguous companion, who would soon return to his precarious but monstrously free life, to his inexhaustible trickle of gold, and an endless series of days.

What I like about this is that the subject here is literally gold but also value -- what we value. Gold is an inherently interesting substance: a soft, easy to work metal that doesn't tarnish. But it's real value, as shown here, is what it can buy -- in this case freedom but for other people it might be something else. And for Levi, about to go into the camps, nothing could be more precious than freedom, and I'm sure this conversation continued to resonate in him over the months that followed.

It's worth mentioning here that, had Levi not been Jewish, he would most likely have been shot at this point instead of going into the camps.

Gold (Au 79)

“In its purest form, it is a bright, slightly reddish yellow, dense, soft, malleable and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements, and is solid under standard conditions. The metal therefore occurs often in free elemental (native) form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, in veins and in alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as electrum) and also naturally alloyed with copper and palladium. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides).

Gold's atomic number of 79 makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally in the universe. It is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis and to have been present in the dust from which the Solar System formed. Because the Earth was molten when it was just formed, almost all of the gold present in the early Earth probably sank into the planetary core. Therefore most of the gold that is present today in the Earth's crust and mantle is thought to have been delivered to Earth later, by asteroid impacts during the late heavy bombardment, about 4 billion years ago.”

...

“A total of 174,100 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history, according to GFMS as of 2012.[4] This is roughly equivalent to 5.6 billion troy ounces or, in terms of volume, about 9020 m3, or a cube 21 m on a side. The world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry.[5]”

...

“Gold leaf can be beaten thin enough to become transparent. The transmitted light appears greenish blue, because gold strongly reflects yellow and red.[11] Such semi-transparent sheets also strongly reflect infrared light, making them useful as infrared (radiant heat) shields in visors of heat-resistant suits, and in sun-visors for spacesuits.[12]”

...

“...since metallic gold is inert to all body chemistry, it has no taste, it provides no nutrition, and it leaves the body unaltered.[52]” -Wiki

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61. The Periodic Table - chapter 9 - Phosphorus + Cremains

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March 29, 2015

p109 In June 1942... I realized that my work was becoming useless, and they too realized this and advised me to look for another job...

I was futilely looking when one morning, a very rare event, I was called to the mine’s telephone: from the other end of the line a Milanese voice, which seemed to me crude and energetic, and which said that it belonged to a Dr. Martini, summoned me to an appointment on the following Sunday at the Hotel Suisse in Turin, without vouchsafing me the luxury of any details. But he had said “Hotel Suisse” and not “Albergo Svizzera” as a loyal citizen would be obliged to say: at that time, which was the time of Starace, [Footnote: A. Starace was for many years secretary of the Fascist National Party. He distinguished himself by the stupid zeal with which he strove to “purify” the customs of the Italians, combating the use of foreign words (in fact, such words as “hotel” or “foyer”] one was very attentive to such piddling details, and one’s ears were expert at intercepting certain nuances.

[They meet at the hotel] p110 ...This commendatore revealed himself from his first remarks to be also a no-nonsense, all-business type, and I understood at that point that this strange haste of “Aryan” Italians [in the sense of being speakers of an Indo-Aryan language] in dealing with Jews was not accidental. Whether intuition or calculation, it served a purpose: with a Jew, at a time of the Defense of the Race, one could be polite, one could even help him, and even boast (cautiously) about having helped him, but it was not advisable to have human relations with him, nor to compromise oneself too deeply, so as not to be forced later to offer understanding or compassion.

He is to work on a cure or treatment for diabetes alongside a classmate from university, Giulia Vineis, who recommended him for the position.

p111 The very next day I quit the mine and moved to Milan with the few things I felt were indispensable: my bike, Rabelais, the Macaronaeae, [?] Moby Dick translated by Parvese, a few other books, my pickax, climbing rope, logarithmic ruler, and recorder [?].

The laboratory is excellent but comes with amazing rules and restrictions, to prevent industrial spying among other things. The shifts of the various chemists are arranged so that they will not ride the same trams to and from work when they might talk to each other. Books from the library are to be destroyed and replaced if anyone makes a mark in them or dog-ears a page for fear that this might give anyone a clue as to what they are working on.

I was tempted to skip the description of Giulia Vineis, but since she is the subject of this chapter, that would have been a mistake.

p113 This viaticum [?] of precepts and prohibitions would have made me permanently unhappy if on entering the lab I had not found Giulia Vineis, quite calm, seated beside her workbench. She was not working -- instead she was darning her stockings, and seemed to be waiting for me. She greeted me with affectionate familiarity and a meaningful grimace.

We had been classmates at the university for four years, and had attended together all the lab courses, which are wonderful matchmakers, without ever becoming particular friends. Giulia was a dark girl, minute and quick; she had eyebrows with an elegant arc, a smooth, pointed face, a lively but precise way of moving. She was more open to practice than to theory, full of human warmth, Catholic without rigidity, generous and slapdash; she spoke in a veiled, distracted voice, as if she were definitely tired of living, which she was not at all. She had been there for nearly a year -- yes, she was the person who mentioned my name to the commendatore: she knew vaguely about my precarious situation at the mine, thought that I would be well suited for that research work, and besides, why not admit it, she was fed up with being alone. But I shouldn't get any ideas: she was engaged, very much engaged, a complicated and tumultuous business that she would explain to me later. And what about me? No? No girls? That’s bad: she would try to help me out there, forget the racial laws; a lot of nonsense anyway, what importance could they have?

She advised me not to take the commendatore’s strange ideas too seriously. Guilia was one of those people who, apparently without asking questions or going to any trouble, immediately knew everything about everybody, which to me, God knows why, never happens; so she was for me a tourist guide and a first-class interpreter... The commendatore was the boss, although subjected to obscure other bosses in Basel; however the person who gave orders was Loredana (and she pointed her out to me from the window... who was his secretary and mistress... Living in that factory was not difficult; it was difficult to work there because of all those entanglements. The solution was simple -- just don’t work: she had realized this immediately, and in a year, modesty aside, she had done hardly anything -- all that she did was set up the apparatus in the morning, just enough to satisfy the eye, and dismount it in the evening in accordance with regulations. The daily report she created out of her imagination. Apart from that, she prepared her trousseau, slept a great deal, wrote torrential letters to her fiance, and against regulations, started conversations with everyone who came within earshot...

p115 Of course, if I wanted to work and the research into diabetes interested me, go right ahead and do it, we would be friends anyway; but I shouldn’t count on her collaboration because she had other things to think about. I could, however, count on her and Varisco [the cleaning woman who is also supposed to prepare his meals] when it came to cooking. They, both of them, had to start training, in view of their coming marriages, and so they would offer me some feeds which would make me forget all about ration cards and rationing... outside of a certain mysterious consultant from Basel who... came once a month... looked around as though he were in a museum, and left without breathing a word, no living being ever entered [the laboratory], and you could do what you liked, so long as you left no traces behind. In the memory of man, the commendatore had never set foot there.

...

p116 ...according to Dr. Kerrn, [A German who wrote a book about diabetes that the commendatore only knows in translation] ... phosphoric acid had a fundamental importance in the metabolism of carbohydrates: and up to this point there was nothing to object to; less convincing was the hypothesis elaborated by the commendatore himself on Kerrn’s rather misty fundamentals namely, that it would suffice to administer to the diabetic a little phosphorus of vegetal origin to correct his subverted metabolism. At that time I was so young as to think that it might be possible to change a superior’s ideas; therefore I put forth two or three objections, but I saw immediately that under their blows the commendatore hardened like a sheet of copper under a hammer. He cut me short and, with a certain peremptory tone of his that transformed his suggestions into commands, advised me to analyse a good number of plants, select the richest in organic phosphorus, make from them the usual extracts, and stick them into the usual rabbits. Enjoy your work and good afternoon.

p117 ...In her [Giulia’s] opinion, that mania of mine about work, which even went to the point of prostituting myself to the commendatore’s senile fairy tales, resulted from the fact I didn’t have a girl friend... It was truly a pity that she, Guilia, was not available, because she realized the sort of person I was, of those who do not take the initiative, indeed run away, and must be led by the hand, solving little by little all their complicated conflicts... it hurt her heart to see someone like me throw away the best years of his youth on rabbits. This Guillia was a bit of a witch -- she read palms, went to mediums, and had premonitory dreams -- and sometimes I dared to think that this haste of hers to free me of an old anguish and procure for me immediately a modest portion of joy came from a dark intuition of hers about what fate had in store for me, and was unconsciously aimed at deflecting it.

...

p118 Giulia was a lioness, capable of traveling for ten hours standing up in a train packed with people running away from the bombings to spend two hours with her man, happy and radiant if she could engage in a violent verbal duel with the commendatore or Loredana, but she was afraid of insects and thunder... A furious storm broke, Guilia stood fast for two strokes of lightning and at the third ran to me for shelter. I felt the warmth of her body against mine, dizzying and new, familiar in dreams, but I did not return her embrace; if I had done so, perhaps her destiny and mine would have gone with a crash off the rails, toward a common, completely unpredictable future.

[Levi, with some difficulty, checks out the book (that the commendatore is fond of from the company library]

p119 It was a strange book: it would be hard to think of its being written and published in any other place than the Third Reich. The author was not without a certain ability, but every one of his pages gave off the arrogance of someone who knows that his statements will not be disputed. He wrote, indeed harangued, like a possessed prophet, as though the metabolism of glucose, in the diabetic and the healthy person, had been revealed to him by Jehovah on Sinai or, rather, by Wotan on Valhalla. Perhaps wrongly, I immediately conceived for Kerrn’s theories a resentful distrust; but I have not heard that the thirty years that have passed since then have let to their reevaluation.

...

p120 I set to work, not at all convinced, though convinced that the commendatore, and most likely Kerrn himself, had given in to the cheap spell of names and cliches; in fact; phosphorus has a very beautiful name (it means “bringer of light”), it is phosphorescent, it’s in the brain, it’s also in fish, and therefore eating fish makes you intelligent; without phosphorus plants do not grow; Falieres developed phosphatine, glycerophosphates for anemic children one hundred years ago; it is in the tips of matches, and girls driven desperate by love ate them to commit suicide; it is in will-o’-the-wisps, putrid flames fleeing before the wayfarer. No it is not an emotionally neutral element: it was understandable that a Professor Kerrn, half biochemist and half witch doctor, in the environment impregnated with black magic of the Nazi court, had designated it as a medicament.

...Just as much as the analysis of nickel in the rock had exalted me... so was I humiliated now by the daily dosage of phosphorus, because to do work in which one does not believe is a great affliction; the presence of Giulia in the next room barely did anything to cheer me up, singing in a muted voice “it’s spring wake up,” and cooking away with the thermometer in the pretty little Pyrex beakers. Every so often she came to contemplate my work, provocative and mocking.

...
[One day Guilia demands that Levi ride her across town so she can confront her perspective in-laws,]

p123 Traveling around Milan on a bike was not at all daring in those days, and to carry a passenger on the crossbar at a time of bombing and with people leaving their homes to spend the night in a safer place was just about normal... Guilia, rather restless as a rule, that evening endangered our stability; she convulsively clutched the handlebar, making it hard to steer, suddenly changing her position with a jerk, illustrating her conversation with violent gestures of her hands and head [I’ve never understood how Italians can communicate by phone without the usual visual clues], which shifted our common center of gravity in an unpredictable manner. Her conversation was at the start somewhat generic, but Guilia was not the type to bottle up her secrets and so harbor bile; halfway down Via Imbonati she had already left generalities behind, and at Porta Volta she spoke in quite explicit terms: she was furious because his parents had said no and she was flying to the counterattack. Why had they said it? -- for them I am not pretty enough, understand? -- she snarled, shaking the handlebar.

“What idiots! You look pretty enough to me.” I said seriously.

“Get smart. You don’t know what it’s all about.”

“I only wanted to pay you a compliment; besides, that’s what I think.”

“This is not the moment. If you’re trying to court me now, I’ll knock you down.”

“You’ll fall, too.”

“You’re a fool. Go on, keep pedaling, it’s getting late.”

By the time we reached Largo Cairoli I already knew everything: or better, I possessed all the factual elements, but so confused and jumbled in their temporal sequence that it was not easy for me to make sense of them.

p124 ...he [her fiance] was holed up in some border barracks to defend the nation. Because, being a goy, he was of course doing his military service: and as I was thinking like this and as Guilia continued to fight with me as if I were her Don Rodrigo [Footnote: A character in Manzoni’s [you should read the entire Wiki entry on him] historical novel The Betrothed...] I felt myself overcome by an absurd hatred for this never encountered rival. A goy, and she was a goya, according to my atavistic terminology: and they could have gotten married. I felt growing within me, perhaps for the first time, a nauseating sensation of emptiness: so this is what it meant to be different: this was the price for being the salt of the earth. To carry on your crossbar a girl you desire and be so far from her as not to be able even to fall in love with her. Carry her on your crossbar along Viale Gorizia to help her belong to someone else, and vanish from my life.

p125 ...Giulia told me to wait for her... and flew through the street door like a gust of wind. I sat down and waited, battered and sorrowful. I thought that I ought to be less of a gentleman, indeed less inhibited and foolish, and that for the rest of my life I would regret that between myself and her there had been nothing but a few school and company memories; and that maybe it was not too late, that maybe the no of those two musical comedy parents would be adamant, that Giulia would come down in tears and I then could console her; and that these were infamous hopes, the way a shipwrecked person tired of struggling lets himself sink straight to the bottom, I fell back on what was my dominant thought during those years: that the existing fiance and the laws of racial separation were only stupid alibis, and that my inability to approach a woman was a condemnation without appeal which would accompany me to my death, confining me to a life poisoned by envy and by abstract, sterile, and aimless desire.

Giulia came out after two hours, in fact burst through the street door like a shell out of a mortar. It was not necessary to question her to find out how things had gone: “I made them look that high,” she said, all red in the face and still gasping. I made an effort to congratulate her in a believable fashion. But it’s impossible to make Guilia believe things you don’t really think, or hide things you do think. Now that she had thrown off that weight, and was shining with victory, she looked me straight in the eye, saw the shadow there, and asked, “What were you thinking about?”

“Phosphorus,” I replied.

If this were a work of fiction, we would get the other sides of this scene. The in-laws-to-be who had provoked Guilia to see what sort of fool their son wanted to marry, and who were pleased by her proper, Italian response. Guilia -- also pleased by the chance both to prove her metal and to enjoy a gloriously emotional confrontation. The fiance, delighted that he had been well out of the way so things could play out as they did.

For my sins, I get frequent doses of Levi’s angst here from my online community friends, most of whom are in their twenties and many either at the same stage of life as Levi here, or still in university. They strike me as penguins who long to fly; doves who long to swim; sloths who long to run. I would alter Levi’s metaphor of the shipwreck survivor who stops struggling and let’s himself drown to someone stuck in quicksand who stops struggling against his nature so that he can live.

Guilia got married a few months later and said goodbye to me, snuffling tears up her nose and giving Varisco detailed alimentary instructions. She has had many hardships and many children; we have remained friends, we see each other every so often in Milan and talk about chemistry and other reasonable matters. We are not dissatisfied with our choices and with what life has given us, but when we meet we both have a curious and not unpleasant impression (which we have both described to each other several times) that a veil, a breath, a throw of the dice deflected us onto two divergent paths, which were not ours.

That last sentence is like a red cape to me: Then whose paths were they? And if those other paths were yours, how did you manage to get off them? Recognizing the essential and beneficial qualities of phosphorus (see below) is not the same as having the chemical composition phosphorus is so eager to bond with. Phosphorus doesn’t just sit around waiting, you need to move quickly, which was clearly not Primo’s style -- a style I recognize all too well.

Phosphorus (P 15)

“...As an element, phosphorus exists in two major forms—white phosphorus and red phosphorus—but due to its high reactivity, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Earth...”

“The first form of elemental phosphorus to be produced (white phosphorus, in 1669) emits a faint glow upon exposure to oxygen – hence its name given from Greek mythology, Φωσφόρος meaning "light-bearer" (Latin Lucifer), referring to the "Morning Star", the planet Venus (or Mercury). The term "phosphorescence", meaning glow after illumination, originally derives from this property of phosphorus, although this word has since been used for a different physical process that produces a glow. The glow of phosphorus itself originates from oxidation of the white (but not red) phosphorus— a process now termed chemiluminescence ...”

“Phosphorus is essential for life. Phosphate is a component of DNA, RNA, ATP, and also the phospholipids, which form all cell membranes. Demonstrating the link between phosphorus and life, elemental phosphorus was first isolated from human urine, and bone ash was an important early phosphate source. Phosphate minerals are fossils. Low phosphate levels are an important limit to growth in some aquatic systems. In a commercial sense, the vast majority of phosphorus compounds are consumed as fertilisers. Phosphate is needed to replace the phosphorus that plants remove from the soil, and its annual demand is rising nearly twice as fast as the growth of the human population.[6] ...”

...

“Urine contains most (94% according to Wolgast[32]) of the NPK nutrients excreted by the human body. The more general limitations to using urine as fertilizer depend mainly on the potential for buildup of excess nitrogen (due to the high ratio of that macronutrient),[33]and inorganic salts such as sodium chloride, which are also part of the wastes excreted by the renal system. The degree to which these factors impact the effectiveness depends on the term of use, salinity tolerance of the plant, soil composition, addition of other fertilizing compounds, and quantity of rainfall or other irrigation.

Urine typically contains 70% of the nitrogen and more than half the phosphorus and potassium found in urban waste water flows, while making up less than 1% of the overall volume. Thus far, source separation, or urine diversion and on-site treatment has been implemented in South Africa, China, and Sweden among other countries with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided some of the funding implementations.[34]

"Urine management" is a relatively new way to view closing the cycle of agricultural nutrient flows and reducing sewage treatment costs and ecological consequences such as eutrophication resulting from the influx of nutrient rich effluent into aquatic or marine ecosystems.[35] Proponents of urine as a natural source of agricultural fertilizer claim the risks to be negligible or acceptable.[36]”

...

“Phosphorus was the 13th element to be discovered. For this reason, and also due to its use in explosives, poisons and nerve agents, it is sometimes referred to as "the Devil's element".[45] It was the first element to be discovered that was not known since ancient times.[citation needed] The discovery of phosphorus is credited to the German alchemist Hennig Brand in 1669, although other chemists might have discovered phosphorus around the same time.[46] Brand experimented with urine, which contains considerable quantities of dissolved phosphates from normal metabolism.[14] Working in Hamburg, Brand attempted to create the fabled philosopher's stone through the distillation of some salts by evaporating urine, and in the process produced a white material that glowed in the dark and burned brilliantly. It was named phosphorus mirabilis ("miraculous bearer of light").[47]”

...

“Antoine Lavoisier recognized phosphorus as an element in 1777.[49] Bone ash was the major source of phosphorus until the 1840s. The method started by roasting bones, then employed the use of clay retorts encased in a very hot brick furnace to distill out the highly toxic elemental phosphorus product.[50] Alternately, precipitated phosphates could be made from ground-up bones that had been de-greased and treated with strong acids. White phosphorus could be then be made by heating the precipitated phosphates, mixed with ground coal or charcoal in an iron pot, and distilling off phosphorus vapour in a retort.[51] Carbon monoxide and other flammable gases produced during the reduction process were burnt off in a flare stack.

In the 1840s, world phosphate production turned to the mining of tropical island deposits formed from bird and bat guano (see also Guano Islands Act). These became an important source of phosphates for fertilizer in the latter half of the 19th century.

Phosphate rock, a mineral containing calcium phosphate, was first used in 1850 to make phosphorus, and following the introduction of the electric arc furnace in 1890, elemental phosphorus production switched from the bone-ash heating, to electric arc production from phosphate rock. After the depletion of world guano sources about the same time, mineral phosphates became the major source of phosphate fertilizer production...”

...

“The Allies used phosphorus incendiary bombs in World War II to destroy Hamburg, the place where the "miraculous bearer of light" was first discovered.[47]” -Wiki

Phosphorus and mother's cremains

When my mother died I scattered her ashes around a tree beside a particular bench adjacent to the area where I scattered most of my dad's cremains. I chose the spot in part because it was comparatively open with little paths that allowed me to go a bit down the slope (I was attempting to be a little stealthy since there is rather a lot of ash left over after a person dies and scattering them here is not quite legal.) Within a year the tree had been blown down and the area was so overgrown as to be inaccessible -- not only the paths but the bench itself disappeared under a mound of thorny bushes.

In part this was due to the area getting more sun with the tree gone, but I like to think, and have reason to think, that my mother's ashes (which were rich in phosphorus) also played a role. Maybe another year after that, the park staff finally cut back the overgrowth so you could at least get to the bench, and now, over ten years later, you are beginning to see the paths again -- but my mother, who always refused to trim our trees (to their detriment) would have loved the riot of plant growth her ashes facilitated -- as did the bees and hummingbirds attracted by all the new flowers. (And she loved hummingbirds as well)

Without really giving it that much thought (unusual for me) I managed to do probably the best thing -- sticking her corpse in the ground to rot or even placing her ashes in an urn in the local Columbarium (as nice as that place is) would not have been nearly as interesting or appropriate.

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