A TABELA PERIÓDICA

Matter, in its radical essence, contains life. And also death. And that which exceeds both life and death. Once recognized, the chemical elements became objects of study and of successive efforts at classification, in accordance with their properties and with the laws derived from their position within the whole. Since Antoine Lavoisier in 1789 (perhaps earlier), scientists have attempted rational systematizations of these elements. Dmitri Mendeleev and Julius Meyer made major advances in this field during the nineteenth century, constructing a model that remains, approximately, the one in use today. With the exception of chemists, few people pause to reflect on what the fundamental elements that constitute matter are, and on what they determine. Within them reside entire universes.

The Italian writer Primo Levi (Turin, 1919–1987) was also a chemist. He perceived a chemistry even more complex than scientific thought allowed itself to see. He plunged into depths that metaphysics cannot explain, where the solidity of the tragic dimension of the inescapable reigns. By following his gaze, we focus on the fortuitousness of living and on the limits of human will. Under this scrutiny, all the great references created—and creative—of meaning, constructed to alleviate everyday anguish, are weakened. Meanings reveal themselves to be always singular and perishable; the attempt to endow certain events in life with meaning is a task worthy of Sisyphus. Rationality seems to hover loosely and fleetingly over the discourses human beings construct about themselves.

Primo Levi was a courageous aesthete of the artificial relationship between reality and the countless stratagems forged to apprehend it. A thankless task, prone to failure, yet a pillar of hope, an indispensable balm that allows the thinking being to tolerate its subjection to the brutality of matter, ignorant of meaning. Sovereign matter. In this work, which oscillates between the ingenuity of fiction and the determinism of memoiristic narrative (fiction of another nature), the author uses some of the components of the periodic table to name, tangentially, what affected or constituted his biography—perhaps applicable to any biography. He creates a beauty so dazzling that it risks going unrecognized. He navigates what he has lived: family, culture, historical moment, and the disquiet produced by the uncertainty that governs past, present, and future. A deeply sensitive text that dispenses with classifications—even periodic ones. Moving prose. It bows before what is superhuman and beyond living. In doing so, it grows immense. Humbly.

Title of the Work: The Periodic Table
Author: Primo Levi
Translator: Luiz Sérgio Henriques
Publisher: Relume Dumará