I look to Primo Levi in The Periodic Table to incite the sharpest attention to particularity.
Iron ends with the refusal of monuments. Ironic that words are all that remain about a person who was not the sort that stories were told about.
Potassium ends with skepticism about the almost the same: "distrust the almost-the-same [...] the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences [...]"
And so for day 578
13.07.2008