Free The Periodic Table by Primo Levi Page A

Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man’s dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: Did I want to follow him?
    It was a terrifying request. To be the assistant’s disciple was for me an enjoyment of every minute, a never before experienced bond, without shadows, rendered more intense by the certainty that the relationship was mutual: I, a Jew, excluded and made skeptical by recent upheavals, the enemy of violence but not yet caught up in the necessity of an opposed violence, I should be for him the ideal interlocutor, a white sheet on which any message could be inscribed.
    I did not mount the new gigantic hippogriff which the assistant offered me. During those months the Germans destroyed Belgrade, broke the Greek resistance, invaded Crete from the air: that was the Truth, that was the Reality. There were no escape routes, or not for me. Better to remain on the Earth, playing with the dipoles for lack of anything better, purify benzene and prepare for an unknown but imminent and certainly tragic future. To purify benzene, then, under the conditions to which the war and the bombings had reduced the Institute was not an insignificant undertaking: the assistant declared that I had carte blanche, I could rummage everywhere from basement to attic, appropriate any instrument or product, but I could not buy anything, even he couldn’t, it was a regime of absolute autarky.
    In the basement I found a huge demijohn of technical benzene, at 95 percent purity, better than nothing, but the manuals prescribed rectifying it and then putting it through a final distillation in the presence of sodium, to free it from the last traces of humidity. To rectify means to distill by fractions, discarding the fractions that boil lower or higher than prescribed, and gathering the “heart,” which must boil at a constant temperature: I found in the inexhaustible basement the necessary glassware, including one of those Vigreux distillation columns, as pretty as a piece of lace, the product of superhuman patience and ability on the part of the glass blower, but (be it said between us) of debatable efficiency, I made the double boiler with a small aluminum pot.
    Distilling is beautiful. First of all, because it is a slow, philosophic, and silent occupation, which keeps you busy but gives you time to think of other things, somewhat like riding a bike. Then, because it involves a metamorphosis from liquid to vapor (invisible), and from this once again to liquid; but in this double journey, up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous and fascinating condition, which starts with chemistry and goes very far. And finally, when you set about distilling, you acquire the consciousness of repeating a ritual consecrated by the centuries, almost a religious act, in which from imperfect material you obtain the essence, the usia, the spirit, and in the first place alcohol, which gladdens the spirit and warms the heart. I took two good days to obtain a fraction of satisfying purity: for this operation, since I had to work with an open flame, I had voluntarily exiled myself to a small room on the second floor, deserted and empty and far from any human presence.
    Now I had to distill a second time in the presence of sodium. Sodium is a degenerated metal: it is indeed a metal only in the chemical significance of the word, certainly not in that of everyday language. It is neither rigid nor elastic; rather it is soft like wax; it is not shiny or, better, it is shiny only if preserved with maniacal care, since otherwise it reacts in a few instants with air, covering itself with an ugly rough rind: with even greater rapidity it reacts with