OTHER PEOPLE'S TRADES
IF ONE LIVES in a compact, serried
group, as bees and sheep do in the winter, there are advantages; one
can defend oneself better from the cold and from attacks. But someone
who lives at the margins of the group, or actually isolated, has
other advantages; he can leave when he wants to and can get a better
view of the landscape. My destiny, helped by my choices, has kept me
far from the aggregations; too much a chemist, and a chemist for too
long, to consider myself a real man of letters; yet too distracted by
the varicolored, tragic, or strange landscape to feel a chemist in
every fiber. In short, I have traveled as a loner and have followed a
winding path, sniffing here and there, forming for myself a haphazard
culture, full of gaps, with a smattering of knowledge. In recompense,
I have enjoyed looking at the world from unusual angles, inverting,
so to speak, the instrumentation: examining matters of technique with
the eye of a literary man, and literature with the eye of a
technician.
The essays collected here (which
already in large part have been published in the Turin newspaper La
Stampa) are the fruit of my roaming about as a curious
dilettante for more than a decade. They are "invasions of the field,"
incursions into other people's trades, poachings in private hunting
preserves, forays into the boundless territories of zoology,
astronomy, and linguistics: sciences which I have never studied
systematically and which for just this reason affect me with the
durable fascination of unsatisfied and unrequited loves, and excite
my instincts as a voyeur and kibitzer. In other essays, I have dared
to take positions on current problems, reread old and modern
classics, or explored the transversal bonds which link the world of
nature to that of culture; I have often set foot on the bridges which
unite (or should unite) the scientific and literary cultures,
stepping over a crevasse which has always seemed to me absurd. There
are people who wring their hands and call it an abyss, but do nothing
to fill it; there are also those who work to widen it, as if the
scientist and literary man belong to two different human subspecies,
reciprocally incomprehensible, fated to ignore each offier and not
apt to engage in cross-fertilization. This is an unnatural schism,
unnecessary, harmful, the result of distant taboos and the
Counter-Reformation, when these do not actually go back to a petty
interpretation of the biblical prohibition against eating a certain
ftuit. It did not concern Empedocles, Dante, Leonardo, Galileo,
Descartes, Goethe, and Einstein, the anonymous builders of the Gothic
cathedrals, and Michelangelo; nor does it concern the good craftsmen
of today, or the physicists hesitating on the brink of the
unknowable.
Sometimes I am asked with curiosity,
or even arrogance, why I write though I am a chemist. I hope that
these essays, within their modest limits of commitment and scope,
will make it clear that between "the two cultures" there is no
incompatibility; on the contrary, there is, at times, when there is
good will, mutual attraction. What's more, I hope I have conveyed to
the reader an impression which I have often had: we are living in an
epoch ripe with problems and perils, but it is not
boring.
PRIMO LEVI