Elements Reacting

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

3 limbs of levity

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi translated by Raymond Rosenthal has a marvellous tricolon.

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.

A wry comment found in the story under the rubric "Cerium", an element, as Levi points out, deriving its name from an astroid named for the Greek goddess Ceres and discovered in the same year as the element.



And so for day 182
14.06.2007