The Story Of A Carbon Atom by Primo Levi

Born in Turin in 1919, Primo Levi graduated in chemistry shortly before the Fascist race laws prohibited Jews like himself from taking university degrees. In 1943 he joined a partisan group in northern Italy, was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. His expertise as a chemist saved him from the gas chambers, however. He was set to work in a factory, and liberated in 1945.
His memoir The Periodic Table takes its title from the table of elements, arranged according to their atomic mass, which was originally devised by Dmitri Mendeleyev in 1869. Levi links each episode of his life to a certain element. But in the book's final section, copied below, he sets himself to imagine the life of a carbon atom. This was, he says, his first 'literary dream', and came to him in Auschwitz.

"Our character lies for hundreds of millions of years, bound to three atoms of oxygen and one of calcium, in the form of limestone: it already has a very long cosmic history behind it, but we shall ignore it. For it time does not exist, or exists only in the form of sluggish variations in temperature, daily or seasonal, if, for the good fortune of this tale, its position is not too far from the earth's surface. Its existence, whose monotony cannot be thought of without horror, is a pitiless alternation of hots and colds, that is, of oscillations (always of equal frequency) a trifle more restricted and a trifle more ample: an imprisonment, for this potentially living personage, worthy of the Catholic Hell. To it, until this moment, the present tense is suited, which is that of description, rather than the past tense, which is that of narration - it is congealed in an eternal present, barely scratched by the moderate quivers of thermal agitation.
But, precisely for the good fortune of the narrator, whose story could otherwise have come to an end, the limestone rock ledge of which the atom forms a part lies on the surface. It lies within reach of man and his pickax (all honor to the pickax and its modern equivalents; they are still the most important intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between the elements and man): at any moment - which I, the narrator, decide out of pure caprice to be the year 1840 - a blow of the pickax detached it and sent it on its way to the lime kiln, plunging it into the world of things that change. It was roasted until it separated from the calcium, which remained so to speak with its feet on the ground and went to meet a less brilliant destiny, which we shall not narrate. Still firmly clinging to two of its three former oxygen companions, it issued from the chimney and took the path of the air. Its story, which once was immobile, now turned tumultuous.
It was caught by the wind, flung down on the earth, lifted ten kilometers high. It was breathed in by a falcon, descending into its precipitous lungs, but did not penetrate its rich blood and was expelled. It dissolved three times in the water of the sea, once in the water of a cascading torrent, and again was expelled. It traveled with the wind, for eight years: now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds, over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice; then it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure.

Carbon, in fact, is a singular element: it is the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance: but its promotion, its entry into the living world, is not easy and must follow an obligatory, intricate path, which has been clarified (and not yet definitively) only in recent years. If the elaboration of carbon were not a common daily occurrence, on the scale of billions of tons a week, wherever the green of a leaf appears, it would by full right deserve to be called a miracle.
The atom we are speaking of, accompanied by its two satellites, which maintained it in a gaseous state, was therefore borne by the wind along a row of vines in the year 1848. It had the good fortune to brush against a leaf, penetrate it, and be nailed there by a ray of the sun. If my language here becomes imprecise and allusive, it is not only because of my ignorance: this decisive event, this instantaneous work a tre - of the carbon dioxide, the light, and the vegetal greenery - has not yet been described in definitive terms, and perhaps it will not be for a long time to come, so different is it from the other ‘organic’ chemistry which is the cumbersome, slow, and ponderous work of man: and yet this refined, minute, and quick-witted chemistry was ‘invented’ two or three billion years ago by our silent sisters, the plants, which do not experiment and do not discuss, and whose temperature is identical to that of the environment in which they live. If to comprehend is the same as forming an image, we will never form an image of a happening whose scale is a millionth of a millimeter, whose rhythm is a millionth of a second and whose protagonists are in their essence invisible. Every verbal description must he inadequate, and one will be as good as the next, so let us settle for the following description.
Our atom of carbon enters the leaf, colliding with other innumerable (but here useless) molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. It adheres to a large and complicated molecule that activates it, and simultaneously receives the decisive message from the sky, in the flashing form of a packet of solar light: in an instant, like an insect caught by a spider, it is separated from its oxygen, combined with hydrogen and (one thinks) phosphorus, and finally inserted in a chain, whether long or short does not matter, but it is the chain of life. All this happens swiftly, in silence, at the temperature and pressure of the atmosphere, and gratis: dear colleagues, when we learn to do likewise we will be sicut Deus [like God], and we will have also solved the problem of hunger in the world.
But there is more and worse, to our shame and that of our art. Carbon dioxide, that is, the aerial form of the carbon of which we have up till now spoken: this gas which constitutes the raw material of life, the permanent store upon which all that grows draws, and the ultimate destiny of all flesh, is not one of the principal components of air but rather a ridiculous remnant, an 'impurity', thirty times less abundant than argon, which nobody even notices. The air contains 0.03 percent; if Italy was air, the only Italians fit to build life would be, for example, the fifteen thousand inhabitants of Milazzo in the province of Messina. This, on the human scale, is ironic acrobatics, a juggler's trick, an incomprehensible display of omnipotence-arrogance, since from this ever renewed impurity of the air we come, we animals and we plants, and we the human species, with our four billion discordant opinions, our milleniums of history, our wars and shames,

nobility and pride. In any event, our very presence on the planet becomes laughable in geometric terms: if all of humanity, about 250 million tons, were distributed in a layer of homogeneous thickness on all the emergent lands, the ‘stature of man’ would not be visible to the naked eye; the thickness one would obtain would be around sixteen thousandths of a millimeter.
Now our atom is inserted: it is part of a structure, in an architectural sense; it has become related and tied to five companions so identical with it that only the fiction of the story permits me to distinguish them. It is a beautiful ring-shaped structure, an almost regular hexagon, which however is subjected to complicated exchanges and balances with the water in which it is dissolved; because by now it is dissolved in water, indeed in the sap of the vine, and this, to remain dissolved, is both the obligation and the privilege of all substances that are destined (I was about to say 'wish') to change. And if then anyone really wanted to find out why a ring, and why a hexagon, and why soluble in water, well, he need not worry; these are among the not many questions to which our doctrine can reply with a persuasive discourse, accessible to everyone, but out of place here.
It has entered to form part of a molecule of glucose, just to speak plainly: a fate that is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, which is intermediary, which prepares it for its first contact with the animal world but does not authorize it to take on a higher responsibility: that of becoming part of a proteic edifice. Hence it travels, at the slow pace of vegetal juices, from the leaf through the pedicel and by the shoot to the trunk, and from here descends to the almost ripe bunch of grapes. What then follows is the province of the winemakers: we are only interested in pinpointing the fact that it escaped (to our advantage, since we would not know how to put it in words) the alcoholic fermentation, and reached the wine without changing its nature.
It is the destiny of wine to be drunk, and it is the destiny of glucose to be oxidized. But it was not oxidized immediately: its drinker kept it in his liver for more than a week, well curled up and tranquil, as a reserve aliment for a sudden effort; an effort that he was forced to make the following Sunday, pursuing a bolting horse. Farewell to the hexagonal structure: in the space of a few instants the skein was unwound and became glucose again, and this was dragged by the bloodstream all the way to a minute muscle fiber in the thigh, and here brutally split into two molecules of lactic acid, the grim harbinger of fatigue: only later, some minutes after, the panting of the lungs was able to supply the oxygen necessary to quietly oxidize the latter. So a new molecule of carbon dioxide returned to the atmosphere, and a parcel of the energy that the sun had handed to the vine-shoot passed from the state of chemical energy to that of mechanical energy, and thereafter settled down in the slothful condition of heat, warming up imperceptibly the air moved by the running and the blood of the runner. 'Such is life', although rarely is it described in this manner: an inserting itself, a drawing off to its advantage, a parasitizing of the downward course of energy, from its noble solar form to the degraded one of low- temperature heat. In this downward course, which leads to equilibrium and thus death, life draws a bend and nests in it.

Our atom is again carbon dioxide, for which we apologize: this too is an obligatory passage; one can imagine and invent others, but on earth that's the way it is. Once again the wind, which this time travels far; sails over die Apennines and the Adriatic, Greece, the Aegean, and Cyprus: we are over Lebanon, and the dance is repeated. The atom we are concerned with is now trapped in a structure that promises to last for a long time: it is the venerable trunk of a cedar, one of the last; it is passed again through the stages we have already described, and the glucose of which it is a part belongs, like the bead of a rosary, to a long chain of cellulose. This is no longer the hallucinatory and geological fixity of rock, this is no longer millions of years, but we can easily speak of centuries because the cedar is a tree of great longevity. It is our whim to abandon it for a year or five hundred years: let us say that after twenty years (we are in 1868) a wood worm has taken an interest in it. It has dug its tunnel between the trunk and the bark, with the obstinate and blind voracity of its race; as it drills it grows, and its tunnel grows with it. There it has swallowed and provided a setting for the subject of this story; then it has formed a pupa, and in the spring it has come out in the shape of an ugly gray moth which is now drying in the sun, confused and dazzled by the splendor of the day. Our atom is in one of the insect’s thousand eyes, contributing to the summary and crude vision with which it orients itself in space. The insect is fecundated, lays its eggs, and dies: the small cadaver lies in the undergrowth of the woods, it is emptied of its fluids, but the chitin carapace resists for a long time, almost indestructible. The snow and sun return above it without injuring it: it is buried by the dead leaves and the loam, it has become a slough, a 'thing', but the death of atoms, unlike ours, is never irrevocable. Here are at work the omnipresent, untiring, and invisible gravediggers of the undergrowth, the microorganisms of the humus. The carapace, with its eyes by now blind, has slowly disintegrated and the ex-drinker, ex-cedar, ex-wood worm has once again taken wing.
We will let it fly three times around the world, until 1960, and in justification of so long an interval in respect to the human measure we will point out that it is, however, much shorter than the average: which, we understand, is two hundred years. Every two hundred years, every atom of carbon that is not congealed in materials by now stable (such as, precisely, limestone, or coal, or diamond, or certain plastics) enters and reenters the cycle of life, through the narrow door of photosynthesis. Do other doors exist? Yes, some syntheses created by man; they are a title of nobility for man-the-maker, but until now their quantitative importance is negligible. They are doors still much narrower than that of the vegetable greenery; knowingly or not, man has not tried until now to compete with nature on this terrain, that is, he has not striven to draw from the carbon dioxide in the air the carbon that is necessary to nourish him, clothe him, warm him, and for the hundred other more sophisticated needs of modern life. He has not done it because he has not needed to: he has found, and is still finding (but for how many more decades?) gigantic reserves of carbon already organicized or at least reduced. Besides the vegetable and animal worlds, these reserves are constituted by deposits of coal and petroleum: but these too are the inheritance of photosynthetic activity carried out in distant epochs, so that one can well affirm that photosynthesis is not only the sole path by which carbon becomes living matter, but also the sole path by which the sun's energy becomes chemically usable.

It is possible to demonstrate that this completely arbitrary story is nevertheless true. I could tell innumerable other stories, and they would all be true: all literally true, in the nature of the transitions, in their order and data. The number of atoms is so great that one could always be found whose story coincides with any capriciously invented story. I could recount an endless number of stories about carbon atoms that become colors or perfumes in flowers; of others which, from tiny algae to small crustaceans to fish, gradually return as carbon dioxide to the waters of the sea, in a perpetual, frightening round-dance of life and death, in which every devourer is immediately devoured, of others which instead attain a decorous semi-eternity in the yellowed pages of some archival document, or the canvas of a famous painter; or those to which fell the privilege of forming part of a grain of pollen and left their fossil imprint in the rocks for our curiosity; of others still that descended to become part of the mysterious shape- messengers of the human seed, and participated in the subtle process of division, duplication, and fusion from which each of us is born. Instead, I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.
It is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one that concerns us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream: it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the carbon which was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one".

from Primo Levi, The Periodic Table 

A for Andromeda - The Galaxy Next Door

There is nothing quite as fantastic for me than to go outside, look up at the stars, point out what is what and see the only galaxy that can be seen with the naked eye, Andromeda - everything else that can be seen with our naked eyes is comets, stars and planets.

Imagine that you could go out into space, far beyond earth and the solar system, far beyond our milky way galaxy, and then turn and look back.  What would our galaxy of a hundred billion starts look like, well we have a pretty good idea because our own galaxy is one of a pair.

It's partner Andromeda is 2,9 million light years away (1 Lightyear = 9.46052894x10E15) and 1000 lightyears across, about twice the mass of ours, but in most respects it is it's twin.  The rotate in opposite directions and are moving towards one another every second they get 100km closer.  One day, 3 billion years from now, our worlds will collide - thats a while away so don't go getting stressed just yet, there are still enough issues on earth at present that are cause for concern.....

Just looking outside tonight, looking up at many identifiable objects such as Jupiter which is very bright tonight, Rigel and Betelgeuse were winking at me also. I wish my camera could have picked up what I was seeing! To think that I was stood in my own back garden, looking at the furthest thing in space that can be seen with the naked eye, not just another star but a whole other galaxy - it blows me away every time and certainly gets my heart ticking faster :)

If you are new to Astronomy, or really not that interested as such - I urge you to get the app for iphone called StarmapPro or puniverse.  Simply open the app and hold it up to the sky, it will tell you what you are looking at, I would then google these objects and have a quick read about them, I promise you that the next time you are out at night you will look up and wonder what is on display again.... It is simply amazing and beautiful.  Andromeda can be seen

Andromeda sent its light to earth long before humans existed....... give it a few moments of your time

http://www.space.com/9605-andromeda-galaxy-visible-eagle-eye-skywatchers.html

December 7, 1988: A day to remember in natural disaster history

Here is another "Day to Remember" blog that I almost shamefully forgot to type.

December 7, 1988, 11.41am, Earthquake Armenia:

In 40 seconds, two violent earth tremors destroyed 80% of the buildings in the town of Spitak and the nearby city of Leninakan (now Gyumn) in northern Armenia.

It left 25,000 dead - tho-thirds were children - and 15,000 injured.

Most of the victims were buried under rubble when poorly constructed Soviet-style concrete buildings collapsed.  

THRIVE: What On Earth Will It Take?

Another must see Movie!"an unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what's REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream -- uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lEV5AFFcZ-s 

A discovery of the ecology of Plants and variations in climate - Alexander Von Humboldt

Alexander Von Humboldt is a guy that is not really that familiar outside of his home town of Germany, unless like me, you are either study Earth/Environmental science or just love reading about it, or maybe you do and still have not heard of him.  I think this guy deserves a mention to say the least, and that everyone should be familiar with him, as his claims to be one of the most important scientists of the past 200 years are extremely persuasive!

He was born in Berlin in 1769, and was well educated and socially privileged enough to be involved in a wide range of political and intellectual affairs at the time when Prussia was at the heart of European politics.  Humboldt was determined to follow in the steps of a Joseph Banks who he had met, by travelling the world for the benefits of science such as Banks did.

He began his career exploring, discovering, cataloguing and sheer scientific entrepreneurship.  He did pioneer work in botany, geology, meteorology, animal physiology, geomagnetism and zoology, discovering new minerals and diamond deposits.  Back home in Germany, he played an important role in the reform of universities, the fostering of research the linking with university scientists with industry.
Overall, he was responsible for a massive professionalisation of science and educational practice.

What really interested me was that he was one of the first scientists to be interested in developing big pictures of climatic trends around the world.  He made wide-ranging studies of temperature variations around Earth and recognised the importance of considering other variables still, such as altitude and aspect on the diverse range of ecology at different altitudes, creating maps outlining this.  These maps were the forerunners of modern maps of average seasonal variations around the Earth, which have recently become of crucial importance in the study of global warming.  One of his papers in 1817, reporting on the variation of the mean temperature around the Earth's surface, invented the concept of the isotherm - any meteorologist will certainly understand the importance of this.

The diversity of Humboldt's interests led naturally to his introduction of comparative studies, looking at correlations between climate, diversity, flora, and topography.  It created a new way of thinking and correlating facts, and is memorial to the contribution he made to science and the great German's talent.  He is certainly a name that should be known a lot more than it is.


A. von Humboldt, Essai sur la geographi des plantes, Paris, 1805.

Emotional Self-Esteem

Oooh what a topic I have chosen to blog about this evening.  Sooo many levels to this and so many paths to go down, I certainly don't want to start blogging too much about this kind of thing, however, I blog about things that are on my mind and this topic is certainly something that has been, umm, is, ummm, well, it's an issue anyway.

A sense of personal wellness, vitality and robustness comprise in my eyes some of the most important components of self-esteem.  It is very difficult to feel good about one self when you're feeling physically and emotionally tired, weak or have/are ill.  I have just had one horrible cold/flu whatever it was, it was some next level stuff - so I totally know that this can certainly effect your self-esteem.  But - here's a big but, feelings, those bloomin' feelings can play a HUGE role in tugging on the old self-esteem strings.

When your out of touch with your feelings, its hard to know who you are.  I think you tend to feel internally detached from yourself and very often fearful, about anything.  By identifying and most importantly expressing the full range of your feelings, you can become better acquainted with your own unique desires, needs - yearnings... It is then that you begin to feel yourself again - but do you???

Learning to express your feelings apparently takes time, courage and the willingness to be vulnerable in the presence of others whom you trust.  Personally, I do not have any trouble what so ever with showing and expressing my feelings, I wear my heart on my sleeve.  This can also be problematic, I will refer back to a previous blog on being too sensitive, being expressive with ones feelings sometimes doesn't do you any good either.  

When your brain is working at a crazily fast rate, things tend to come out of your mouth before you have actually thought about the repercussions of what you have said.  I do this a lot, it is not that I do not mean what I say, I always mean what I say, but I say too much.  Yes, it is who I am, it is how I have been brought up, it probably will serve me well in my future career after I graduate, it has certainly served me well in my past career too, but sometimes, it is just as well to keep ones feelings close to ones self, as there is a time and a place for them.  If you are too expressive, I am finding that it can actually do quite the opposite of what you intended it to do in the first place.

How does one simply stop being ones self - I do not have the answer to this.  Maybe the older you get the wiser you get I don't know... but the point of this blog is that feelings certainly do have an impact of your own self-esteem - it is important to be in touch with them, to be aware of them - but I am just not sure what you actually do with them??????  Typing a blog about it can help a bit ;)

Intimacy

Intimacy - it's what some of us need, it's what some of us lack, what some of us want, what some of us don't..
While some people seem content to go through life with a few close friends, most of us seek a special relationship with one particular person.  I have kinda had this on my mind for a while now and made me decide to write a small blog on it, because, it is in intimate relationships that we open ourselves most deeply and have the chance to discover the most about ourselves.

Such relationships help overcome a certain loneliness that most of us would eventually feel - no matter how self-sufficient and strong we may be - without intimacy.   The sense of belonging that we gain from intimate relationships contributes substantially to our feelings of self-worth.  Saying that, I want to strongly emphasise here that self-worth cannot derive entirely from someone else, but a healthy, intimate relationship simply reinforces your own self-acceptance and belief in yourself.

What would constitute an intimate relationship for you? What would you consider to be a really important part of a healthy relationship?  Well, this all depends of the individual of course, and what you want from that particular relationship.  Maybe you are getting a sense that the reason why I am writing this is because I am myself maybe lacking in an area of intimacy and therefore decided to write a blog on the subject - because indeed, I am no professional psychologist when it comes to the inner workings of the human mind, however I know my own, and I know how I feel and I do not think I am alone when it comes to factors that we see are key to a healthy relationship.  Am I lacking in this area - this is for me to know, this is not the point of this blog, however when I type out my thoughts, it generally helps me more clearly see the things in a different context to what is in my head.

To name but a few factor that I see to be important for a happy, healthy, fun and intimate relationship, and not in any rank order, are:

1. A sense of romance or "magic"between you and the other person.  This is an intangible quality of attraction that goes well beyond the physical level.  It has to be strong and has to be a continued path of new discovery.  The butterflies in the belly feeling, the cannot wait to see them feeling and when you do, its like you are learning something new each time.... this to me is very important.

2. Regular expressions of affection and touching.  Either non sexual but definitely sexual.  The ability to explore and discover, trying new things.... very very important.

3.  Being able to share feelings.  Genuine closeness and being willing to open up and share your deepest feelings.

4.  Common values and a larger sense of purpose.  Values that you see as an important part of life, such as career, family, health, education and to me, the need and want to make a change to make this world a better place, no matter how small it may be.

5. Good communication - the ability to listen to each other and meet at some common ground.

6. Mutual acceptance and support of each others growths and personal changes.  

7. Mutual acceptance of each others weaknesses or faults.  Gee we all have them, but it is being able to tolerate them that makes it work.

Is there any factors in this small list that you would choose? maybe you have totally different ideas on what makes a perfect relationship.  Whatever your list includes, I think that it is very important to have a good intimate relationship as it contributes substantially to our own feelings of self-worth, and if we feel worthy then we should feel happy and content - I think???? ;)