Molecules of an author in search of memory

Dei Luigi

Description

Loosely based on Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, the play has a Fahrenheit 451 setting. In a world without books or memory appears a common man, the Man in the street, with some heets of writing that he cannot make out. With the help of the narrator, Science, Technology and Nature, and of two actors who remain offstage for a long while – Primo and his friend Alberto – this man is able to reconstruct the events of the chapter entitled Cerium. In this way, and thanks to this act of remembrance, lost identity – our history – is recreated.







Luigi Dei is a scholar of international renown in Materials Chemistry at the «Ugo Schiff» Department of Chemistry at the University of Florence, where he teaches chemistry in the Science School. The author of numerous scientific articles to have appeared in international journals, he also dedicates himself to the popularisation of science, and to the relationship between science, art and literature. A shining example of this is his recent lecture-performance, Science reveals Ravel’s Bolero.

Informations

• Publié par: Firenze University Press
• Date de parution: 07 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788866554745
• Langue: English

Extrait

Luigi Dei
Molecules of an author in search of memory
A civil-scientific play of two acts
Preface by
Roald Hoffmann Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1981
Translation by
Emma Garner

Firenze University Press
2013
Molecules of an author in search of memory : a civil-scientific play of two acts / Luigi Dei. – Firenze : Firenze University Press, 2013.
http://digital.casalini.it/9788866554745
ISBN 978-88-6655-474-5 (online PDF)
ISBN 978-88-6655-480-6 (online EPUB)

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The play was written under the auspices of the OpenLab project, part of the Communication and External Relations Department of the University of Florence, whose aim is to promote and popularise the science.



The English translation was sponsored by Endura SpA - A passion for chemistry






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Cover image reproduced by kind permission of the Carima Foundation, Palazzo Ricci Museum, Macerata. Osvaldo Licini – Amalassunta , oil on canvas – 19.5 x 28 cm.

Original title: Molecole d’autore in cerca di memoria
© 2011 Firenze University Press

Graphic design: Alberto Pizarro Fernández, Pagina Maestra snc
© 2013 Firenze University Press
Università degli Studi di Firenze
Firenze University Press
Borgo Albizi, 28, 50122 Firenze, Italy
http://www.fupress.com/
Printed in Italy
Table of contents
Preface
Introduction
Characters in order of appearance
Act One
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Act Two
Scene One
Scene Two
Preface
The last few years I taught introductory chemistry, I read Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table with the hundred or so students in my class. I’ve done it also with a class of a thousand – yes, we teach such gigantic courses in the US. And Levi’s books are required reading as well in courses on biography, on memory, on the Holocaust at my university, Cornell University in New York State.
Why do I have my students read Primo Levi? Because even in this great university their lives are fragmented and compartmentalized. They study chemistry, survive through the next problem set in mathematics, step into a history course. And Levi’s life was not fragmented. Chemistry was an essential part of his existence, hardly separated from survival or philosophy. Some of that may have been chance (the role chemistry played in his survival in the concentration camp, which you see and hear retold, in an exemplary manner, in this play), but it was also an inner choice. I want my students to feel this. Not because I want them necessarily to be chemists. But I feel a need to put before them a vision of a man, who might not have been one of the heroic figures of chemistry, but one for whom the world was one.
It would be natural that I, a chemist who is also a writer, and one who is Jewish as well, and a survivor of World War II, should encounter and be interested in the work and person of Primo Levi. But there is more to our bond – in so many things I’ve written I’ve found a resonance in Levi. For instance, the contrast of creation and discovery is something that has fascinated me. The twentieth century in chemistry was that of synthesis, of the making of molecules. Creation is different from discovery. It brings chemistry close to the arts. And, lest we get too high on that, it brings us close to engineering. The recognition of the centrality of synthesis was well understood by Levi, thus the instant sympathy and admiration between the chemist and the builder Faussone in the The Monkey’s Wrench , La Chiave a Stella . This is doubly interesting as Levi was by training an industrial and analytical chemist, and many of the achievements of The Periodic Table are discovery stories.
I wrote a book, The Same and Not the Same , in which there is conveyed a vaguely Jungian view of chemistry, each of the molecular science’s facts precariously balanced along many axes or polarities. Pure/impure is one, as is natural/unnatural, harm/benefit, creation and discovery, to reveal/to conceal, equilibrium/extreme. And identity or difference, the greatest of polarities.
Sure enough Primo Levi expresses that tension beautifully, in the context of a chapter in The Periodic Table where he tires of chemistry «Where are theorems of chemistry?» he says, and turns to physics. Where he has to do some chemistry. He needed sodium to dry an organic solvent, but he used potassium, another alkali metal, right under sodium in the periodic table instead. He writes of what the experience meant to him:
[…] I thought of another moral […] and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), 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, like a railroad’s switch points; the chemist’s trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist’s trade.
Now that is great writing, a deep human insight. I like it that it begins in chemistry.

May, 2013
Roald Hoffmann
Cornell University
Introduction
Luigi Dei is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florence, where he teaches degree courses in Science and Technology for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage at both undergraduate and graduate level. He is also head of a special interdepartmental University Centre for the application of science and technology to the preservation of cultural heritage – a concrete manifestation of his interest in the relationship between science and the arts. Dei is greatly appreciated by his students for his excellent communication skills, which he also uses in order to further the popularisation of science. By way of illustration, I should like to recall his fantastic presentation of Ravel’s Bolero , in which he demonstrated the physical and chemical characteristics of various orchestral instruments, in relationship to their timbres and to their role in the musical score. His civic engagement has led him to give a series of lectures dedicated to Primo Levi, and he has also edited a volume in memory of Levi entitled Voices from around the world for Primo Levi. In memory, for memory .
This work represents the coming together of these various elements. Subtitled a ‘civil-scientific play’, it unfurls in the wake of an episode from Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table which details the way in which Levi and his friend, Alberto Dalla Volta, manage to obtain bread in the concentration camp in which they are detained by trading cigarette lighter flints produced thanks to the intermetallic compound, iron-cerium.
The narration is carried out by a voice that complains of its world where remembering appears to be a thing of the past, no books are printed anymore and memories are wiped out. Into this scenario comes a common man, a man in the street, who has found some sheets of paper that he cannot decipher. With the help of the narrator, Science, Technology and Nature, and of two voices that for a long while remain offstage, that of Primo and his friend Alberto, he succeeds in reconstructing the cerium episode as described by Levi in the afore-mentioned work.
The work hinges then on the issue of remembrance, and on the reconstruction of a lost identity – that of our history. In this reconstruction feature the wonderful contributions of Science, Nature and Technology, who by turns explain – via remarkable scientific illustrations – the attempts made by Primo and Alberto to obtain edible substances from whatever they could find in the laboratory where Levi was working outside the camp. These dialogues also exemplify how strongly entwined Science and Technology are, building to a crescendo which culminates in a declaration of true love between these two protagonists.
The narration ends with a beautifully moving passage – again inspired by Levi’s publication – on the carbon cycle, which takes as its point of departure a crematorium where Alberto may have ended his days and the observation made by the man in the street that no trace remains of him. This prompts Alberto to intervene, elucidating the way in which the carbon of his burnt body could potentially be present in the bodies of the spectators of the play that he and others are putting on.
In this book, or script, all of Luigi Dei’s principal qualities are present: a strong sense of moral and civil obligation, and a keen desire to demonstrate how the targeted use of science represents a fundamental part of life and of man’s history.

Florence, July 2011
Roberto Casalbuoni
President of OpenLab
Characters in order of appearance

Narrator
Man in the street
Primo (Levi)
Science
Alberto (Dalla Volta)
Nature
Technology
Act One
Scene One
A simple, sparse setting, in semi-darkness. Toward the front of the stage: a coat stand with an overcoat, hat and scarf; a desk with a computer, a few scattered sheets of paper, pens and pencils; several bookcases with no books, only ornaments and vases of flowers, and three television sets of varying size on the shelves; armchairs and sofas.
Characters: Narrator, Man in the street, Primo.
N arrator ( Alone on the stage, pacing up and down. Appears sad, but also rather agitated; angry with himself and with the world in general ) – What kind of world is this in which we live only for images, for the present, for unbridled hedonism and consumerism, w