• for: false dichotomy of sustaining modernity

• paraphrase

  • The pace of modernity can neither be sustained in a high carbon nor a low carbon green economy
  • No matter what the political party, they all subscribe to a view of sustaining the same or greater pace of modernity

• comment

  • libertarians want no constraints
  • but nature herself imposes limits
  • populations collapse if resources are overused
  • human populations who adopt a Libertarian approach eventually encounter a limit anyways

As Levi writes in the preface to the theatrical adaptation of SQ - produced in collaboration with Pietro Alberto Marché - all those imprisoned in the Lager hoped to find an attentive audience: ‘speravamo non di vivere e raccontare, ma di vivere per raccontare. È il sogno dei reduci di tutti i tempi, e del forte e del vile, del poeta e del semplice, di Ulisse e del Ruzante’ (OC I, 1195). In this chapter, therefore, Ulysses’s canto does not simply identify the monologue of Dante’s Ulysses, which Levi painfully pieces together from memory and translates for Pikolo; it also signifies the song of the hero who has survived his ordeal and is eager to tell his story to anyone who is willing to listen. Levi drew inspiration for his radio and theatre adaptations of SQ from an earlier, independent radio program on Canadian national radio. Levi praises this experiment for its ability to capture the lack of communication, aggravated by the confusion of languages, that had been a central device in the Lager’s machine of dehumanisation and annihilation. As Levi reports, the Canadian authors explained their decision not to translate the bits of dialogues in different languages to convey the author’s experience, ‘perché questo isolamento è la parte fondamentale della sua sofferenza, e la sofferenza, sua e di tutti i prigionieri, scaturiva dal proposito deliberato di espellerli dalla comunità umana, di cancellare la loro identità, di ridurli da uomini a cose’ (OC I, 1196). Tellingly, the moment of catharsis between Levi and Pikolo is made possible by the act of translation, the only instrument capable of redeeming the Babelic confusion of languages.

A willingness to listen, however, is the key precondition for successful communication and a veritable ‘flaw of form’ in the universe of the Lager, especially when this attitude is displayed by someone (like Pikolo) who enjoys a superior position in the camp’s hierarchy. Levi’s gratuitous election to be Pikolo’s travelling companion in the journey to the kitchen, and Pikolo’s openness to listen, may be fittingly celebrated through a subversive reinterpretation of Ulysses’s last words, ‘come altrui piacque’. Could this be part of the unspoken realisation that is capable of reshaping, albeit only contingently, Levi’s own understanding of their condition in the Lager?

In two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, Levi further elaborates on the ethical imperative to listen that is at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. He also reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext from ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole (see also the story ‘Capaneo’).

In ‘Lilít’, a heavy downpour of rain makes it impossible for prisoners to work and compels them to find shelter and temporary rest. Levi slides into a large pipe. From the other side of the pipe, another inmate known as Tischler enters. Tischler spends this recreational time sharing with Levi the story of Lilít. According to some Kabbalistic interpretations of the Bible, Lilít was Adam’s first wife. For rebelling against both Adam and God, she was turned into a devil and eventually became God’s mistress. Their union continues today and is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. Tischler teases Levi for not knowing this story and jokes about Levi being an Epicurean like all other Westerner Jews. The use of the label ‘Epicurean’ to define the ‘miscredenti’, I suggest, gestures to the subtext of Dante’s Inferno 10, where the sin of heresy is named precisely as Epicurus’s sin. Those punished for this sin are condemned to burn in a sarcophagus. Each sarcophagus houses several souls who, like Levi and Tischler, must share the same narrow space, but, crucially, are uninterested in communicating with each other. (Indeed some of Tischler’s phrasing echoes Dante: e.g. verrà un potente… farà morire Lilít’, and cf. Inf. 1.101-02.) This Dantean reminiscence is not the only element that links ‘Lilít’ to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount a successful act of communication and storytelling in the Lager. But there are two significant inversions: this time, the protagonists move inside a hollow space and Levi is the one who plays the part of the attentive listener. This shift, I believe, is signalled in the text by Tischler’s injunction: ‘perché oggi la mia parte è di raccontare e di credere: l’incredulo oggi sei tu’ (OC II, 252; emphasis added). Tischler’s words seem to echo Levi’s thoughts in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ that ‘Se Jean è intelligente capirà. Capirà: oggi mi sento da tanto’. That Tischler plays the part that had been Levi’s in his dialogue with Pikolo is further confirmed by the former’s gesture of sharing an apple with Levi, before telling his story, as a way to celebrate their common birthday. This act amounted to blasphemy in the Lager, where everyone used every means to survive, even stealing food from other inmates. In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi tells us that, like Tischler, he would be willing to give up his daily ration of food in exchange for being able to remember Dante’s text correctly and share it with Pikolo: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’. Like Pikolo, and unlike Dante’s Epicureans, Levi pays attention to Tischler’s story and, by retelling it, saves it from annihilation.

In ‘Un discepolo’, Levi is back in the underground tank and, as with Pikolo, he is trying to translate to another Häftling, Bandi, the text of a letter from his family that had been smuggled into the camp by an Italian worker. The episode is almost identical to the one narrated in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Once again, moreover, Levi emphasises his listener’s attention: ‘Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale’ (OC II, 258; emphasis added). Bandi also shares food with Levi. Hence, the act of sharing/giving up food becomes a physical marker of their desire to share their lives through human communication and let themselves be nurtured by it.

For Levi, the real protagonists of these exceptional acts of communication in the Lager are not the messengers but the listeners. Those, in other words, who were able to resist the continuous and exhausting process of reification enforced by the camp and could muster enough human empathy and curiosity to listen con attenzione.

FG

Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative – Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

EL

Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative - Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

EL

Interlinguistic mutuality. Shuttling between recitation of Dante’s text in the Italian original and its hurried and utilitarian French prose version, the lesson Primo imparts to Jean is deeply interlinguistic. The exchange between Jean and Primo is also mutual, at the very basic level of collaboration that any linguistic exchange requires. In addition, Jean is not a passive learner. He takes part in the process of communication, which unfolds in a living dialogue and requires that dialogue to exist. The first words of Italian that Jean picks up and adopts emerge from the living context of a spoken exchange, by the ‘natural’ and immediate imitation of two native speakers. The syllabification of the initial vocabulary Jean apprehends (“zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”) from those exchanged between Primo and another prisoner from Rome, Limentani, is not a marker of alienness but of co-participation. More importantly, the learning process is from the start accompanied by a smile, a pre-linguistic sign of mutual understanding.

Levi’s insistence on the collaborative work that undergirds the acts of interlinguistic communication taking place in the episode resonates with Walter Benjamin’s notion that translation is the cultural practice which best captures the intrinsic drive of all languages to communicate through their apparent mutual exclusiveness: ‘All suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant […]. Whereas all individual elements of foreign languages - words, sentences, associations - are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions’ (‘The Translator’s Task’, 156). The experience of shared humanity, which Primo and Jean achieve within the Babel of the Lager, and notwithstanding its violence, relies on the same underlying philosophy of language as Benjamin’s.

(For more on this, go here next.)

SM

As Levi writes in the preface to the theatrical adaptation of SQ - produced in collaboration with Pietro Alberto Marché - all those imprisoned in the Lager hoped to find an attentive audience: ‘speravamo non di vivere e raccontare, ma di vivere per raccontare. È il sogno dei reduci di tutti i tempi, e del forte e del vile, del poeta e del semplice, di Ulisse e del Ruzante’ (OC I, 1195). In this chapter, therefore, Ulysses’s canto does not simply identify the monologue of Dante’s Ulysses, which Levi painfully pieces together from memory and translates for Pikolo; it also signifies the song of the hero who has survived his ordeal and is eager to tell his story to anyone who is willing to listen. Levi drew inspiration for his radio and theatre adaptations of SQ from an earlier, independent radio program on Canadian national radio. Levi praises this experiment for its ability to capture the lack of communication, aggravated by the confusion of languages, that had been a central device in the Lager’s machine of dehumanisation and annihilation. As Levi reports, the Canadian authors explained their decision not to translate the bits of dialogues in different languages to convey the author’s experience, ‘perché questo isolamento è la parte fondamentale della sua sofferenza, e la sofferenza, sua e di tutti i prigionieri, scaturiva dal proposito deliberato di espellerli dalla comunità umana, di cancellare la loro identità, di ridurli da uomini a cose’ (OC I, 1196). Tellingly, the moment of catharsis between Levi and Pikolo is made possible by the act of translation, the only instrument capable of redeeming the Babelic confusion of languages.

A willingness to listen, however, is the key precondition for successful communication and a veritable ‘flaw of form’ in the universe of the Lager, especially when this attitude is displayed by someone (like Pikolo) who enjoys a superior position in the camp’s hierarchy. Levi’s gratuitous election to be Pikolo’s travelling companion in the journey to the kitchen, and Pikolo’s openness to listen, may be fittingly celebrated through a subversive reinterpretation of Ulysses’s last words, ‘come altrui piacque’. Could this be part of the unspoken realisation that is capable of reshaping, albeit only contingently, Levi’s own understanding of their condition in the Lager?

In two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, Levi further elaborates on the ethical imperative to listen that is at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. In these stories, I argue, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext from ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole (see also the story ‘Capaneo’).

In ‘Lilít’, a heavy downpour of rain makes it impossible for prisoners to work and compels them to find shelter and temporary rest. Levi slides into a large pipe. From the other side of the pipe, another inmate known as Tischler enters. Tischler spends this recreational time sharing with Levi the story of Lilít. According to some Kabbalistic interpretations of the Bible, Lilít was Adam’s first wife. For rebelling against both Adam and God, she was turned into a devil and eventually became God’s mistress. Their union continues today and is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. Tischler teases Levi for not knowing this story and jokes about Levi being an Epicurean like all other Westerner Jews. The use of the label ‘Epicurean’ to define the ‘miscredenti’, I suggest, gestures to the subtext of Dante’s Inferno 10, where the sin of heresy is named precisely as Epicurus’s sin. Those punished for this sin are condemned to burn in a sarcophagus. Each sarcophagus houses several souls who, like Levi and Tischler, must share the same narrow space, but, crucially, are uninterested in communicating with each other. (Indeed some of Tischler’s phrasing echoes Dante: e.g. verrà un potente… farà morire Lilít’, and cf. Inf. 1.101-02.) This Dantean reminiscence is not the only element that links ‘Lilít’ to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount a successful act of communication and storytelling in the Lager. But there are two significant inversions: this time, the protagonists move inside a hollow space and Levi is the one who plays the part of the attentive listener. This shift, I believe, is signalled in the text by Tischler’s injunction: ‘perché oggi la mia parte è di raccontare e di credere: l’incredulo oggi sei tu’ (OC II, 252; emphasis added). Tischler’s words seem to echo Levi’s thoughts in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ that ‘Se Jean è intelligente capirà. Capirà: oggi mi sento da tanto’. That Tischler plays the part that had been Levi’s in his dialogue with Pikolo is further confirmed by the former’s gesture of sharing an apple with Levi, before telling his story, as a way to celebrate their common birthday. This act amounted to blasphemy in the Lager, where everyone used every means to survive, even stealing food from other inmates. In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi tells us that, like Tischler, he would be willing to give up his daily ration of food in exchange for being able to remember Dante’s text correctly and share it with Pikolo: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’. Like Pikolo, and unlike Dante’s Epicureans, Levi pays attention to Tischler’s story and, by retelling it, saves it from annihilation.

In ‘Un discepolo’, Levi is back in the underground tank and, as with Pikolo, he is trying to translate to another Häftling, Bandi, the text of a letter from his family that had been smuggled into the camp by an Italian worker. The episode is almost identical to the one narrated in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Once again, moreover, Levi emphasises his listener’s attention: ‘Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale’ (OC II, 258; emphasis added). Bandi too shares food with Levi. Hence, the act of sharing/giving up food becomes a physical marker of their desire to share their lives through human communication and let themselves be nurtured by it.

For Levi, the real protagonists of these exceptional acts of communication in the Lager are not the messengers but the listeners. Those, in other words, who were able to resist the continuous and exhausting process of reification enforced by the camp and could muster enough human empathy and curiosity to listen con attenzione.

FG

Interlinguistic mutuality. Shuttling between recitation of Dante’s text in the Italian original and its hurried and utilitarian French prose version, the lesson Primo imparts to Jean is deeply interlinguistic. The exchange between Jean and Primo is also mutual, at the very basic level of collaboration that any linguistic exchange requires. In addition, Jean is not a passive learner. He takes part in the process of communication, which unfolds in a living dialogue and requires that dialogue to exist. The first words of Italian that Jean picks up and adopts emerge from the living context of a spoken exchange, by the ‘natural’ and immediate imitation of two native speakers. The syllabification of the initial vocabulary Jean apprehends (“zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”) from those exchanged between Primo and another prisoner from Rome, Limentani, is not a marker of alienness but of co-participation. More importantly, the learning process is from the start accompanied by a smile, a pre-linguistic sign of mutual understanding.

Levi’s insistence on the collaborative work that undergirds the acts of interlinguistic communication taking place in the episode resonates with Walter Benjamin’s notion that translation is the cultural practice which best captures the intrinsic drive of all languages to communicate through their apparent mutual exclusiveness: ‘All suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant […]. Whereas all individual elements of foreign languages - words, sentences, associations - are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions’ (‘The Translator’s Task’, 156). The experience of shared humanity, which Primo and Jean achieve within the Babel of the Lager, and notwithstanding its violence, relies on the same underlying philosophy of language as Benjamin’s.

SM

Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative - Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

EL

"I didn't fully understand it at the time, but throughout my time as a freshman at Boston College I've realized that I have the power to alter myself for the better and broaden my perspective on life. For most of my high school experience, I was holding to antiquated thoughts that had an impact on the majority of my daily interactions. Throughout my life, growing up as a single child has affected the way am in social interactions. This was evident in high school class discussions, as I did not yet have the confidence to be talkative and participate even up until the spring term of my senior year."

Im, H., Ahn, C., Wang, P., & Chen, C. (2020, April 13). An Early Examination: Psychological, Health, and Economic Correlates and Determinants of Social Distancing Amidst COVID-19. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9ravu

Beggars can not be choosers

Again, hunger comes up. Mary speaks of both the need for nourishment both physically and spiritually.