The fundamental things apply ... as Life goes by

[Graybeard]

The Story of a Carbon Atom

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, printed 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.

(continued)

[Graybeard]

(cont)

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.

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

(this and the above post is for Austin ... who will see with equal clarity what I see .. Greg)

[austintorn@aol.com]

The clarity of reality is there to be seen. No foggy notions required.