Primo Levi and me

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How a quarantine read helped me realise the true beauty of chemistry

An illustration featuring one of Primo Levi's books

Source: © M-H Jeeves

In a world of chaos, a good book can shine meaning on life

For four years, I spent almost every day looking at a periodic table. As a recent chemistry graduate, there were posters of it on the walls of my lecture halls, a fold-out version of it tucked into my lab notebook, and I even had a periodic table laptop sticker on my computer.

Yet a few months ago in quarantine, I stumbled upon a different Periodic Table – the book by Primo Levi. For those who are unfamiliar with Levi, he was a Jewish Italian chemist and writer who chronicled what it was like to live through the Holocaust. The fact that our paths had not crossed until now seemed almost purposeful: I had also studied Italian, aspired to be a writer, and attended more years of Hebrew School than I can remember.

While 16-year-old Levi decided to be a chemist after reading William Bragg’s Concerning the Nature of Things, my interest in chemistry did not start until college. Like most pre-med students, I intended to major in biology, but was still required to take a few semesters of general and organic chemistry. These difficult courses, which are prerequisites for US medical schools, are often said to be classes you just have to ‘get through’. As a result, I was terrified of the subject – I thought of chemistry as more of a gatekeeper and less of a gate.

Yet, as I sat in my biology lectures, I felt that there was an underlying element of mystery. Substrates would just fit into enzymes and spit out products. A molecule of glucose would churn through the names of different molecules to somehow produce ATP. I’m a ‘but how?’ kind of person, and these enigmas frustrated me to no end.

While 16-year-old Levi decided to be a chemist after reading William Bragg’s Concerning the Nature of Things, my interest in chemistry did not start until college. Even then, chemistry was one of the last subjects I thought I would end up majoring in. Like most pre-med students, I intended to major in biology, but was still required to take a few semesters of general and organic chemistry. These difficult courses, which are prerequisites for US medical schools, are often said to be classes you just have to ‘get through’. As a result, I was terrified of the subject – I thought of chemistry as more of a gatekeeper and less of a gate.

Yet, as I sat in my biology lectures, I felt that there was an underlying element of mystery. Substrates would just fit into enzymes and spit out products, a reaction that was depicted in textbook illustrations like the slotting together of puzzle pieces. A molecule of glucose would churn through the names of different molecules to somehow produce ATP. I’m a ‘but how?’ kind of person, and these enigmas frustrated me to no end.

It turns out the missing element to my studies was chemistry. I loved it. Through chemistry, you could understand why things happened, with theories spanning down to the fine details of electron behaviour. Frankly, it felt like you could understand everything. For four years, I was surrounded by professors and graduate students whose knowledge only further convinced me that chemistry could be used to unlock the mysteries of the world.

This ability of chemistry to defy the unknown seems to be what drove Levi to the field as well. Levi writes in one of the earlier chapters of The Periodic Table, ‘That the Nobility of Man … consisted in making himself master of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wished to keep faith with this nobility.’ He adds that ‘to conquer matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary in order to understand the universe and ourselves’.

When the Covid-19 pandemic first started making the news in the January of my senior year, my chemistry professor predicted how destructive the virus would be. I ignored his warnings. I believed that if we came together as a world, we could conquer matter. Yet months later, I feel that I was wrong. Even though we have started to control the virus with groundbreaking vaccines, we have certainly not conquered it.

The beauty of the subject I spent four years studying is not about mastering matter

Levi seems to face his own realisation that conquering matter is not possible. In a chapter entitled ‘Potassium’, he starts by noting the impending Nazi invasion and that ‘the fate of Europe and the world seemed to be sealed’. Later on in the chapter, he talks about doubting chemistry, which he sees now as more of a recipe to be followed than an explanation of how things work. Although he doesn’t explicitly state it, these two facts seem tied: chemistry was supposed to give Levi the power to understand the world, but there is no way to explain the incomprehensible evil that was approaching.

Levi of course returns to chemistry. Why? I feel that it is the last chapter where everything comes together, which is both a reflection of Levi’s admiration for chemistry and the part of the book I found most meaningful to where I am in my life now.

Levi recounts the journeys and adventures of a carbon atom throughout time, from the yellowed pages of a document in an archive, the lungs of a falcon, a grain of pollen, and finally a glass of milk that powers Levi to write his book. ‘There is no certainty,’ he remarks, ‘the number of atoms is so large that one would always find one whose story coincides with any story invented at random’.

That chapter made me realise that the beauty of the subject I spent four years studying is not about mastering matter. Rather, it is about imagining possibilities. And as I start to figure out my place in a world that doesn’t look quite as I had imagined, it is a reminder that how I choose to harness the atoms and elements that make me up is, in fact, still limitless.