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Both of the autobiographical novels are about slowly mastering the world through science; they both create paradigmatic parallels between the protagonist’s coming of age and the history of chemistry.

The chemist’s attainment of legal majority might be summarised as follows. There is a gradual discovery of and process of mastering the world, which begins with the small boy’s questions about the identity of objects. The boy goes on to make use of his senses in order to recognise and define the entities in the world. He then tries to recreate these things by himself and succeeds in creating an order, a system for classifying the world. The final stage is the theoretical threshold at which the very classification system and even basic trust in the human senses are questioned. The history of chemistry, from alchemy to quantum theory, is therefore infused with the growth and maturation of the protagonist’s conscience. It is interesting to note that in his novel Sacks quotes the Italian nineteenth-century chemist Stanislao Cannizzaro (1826-1910), who writes that the history of chemistry should be in the mind of students: “It often happens”, Cannizzaro concludes, “that the mind of a person who is learning a new science, has to pass through all the phases which the science itself has exhibited in its historical evolution.” Cannizarro’s words, Sacks recalls, “had a powerful resonance for me, because I too, in a way, was living through, recapitulating the history of chemistry in myself, rediscovering all the phases through which it had passed” (UT, p. 155).¹⁷ This seems to be a precise metapoetic description of both novels, although Sacks’ book finishes with the story of the end of his “love affair” with chemistry. Chemistry had been a constant instrument and filter for his understanding and perception of the world. Describing his early childhood, he recalls his endless and obsessive questions on the metals. “Why were they shiny? Why smooth? Why hard? Why heavy? Why did they bend, not break? Why did they ring?” (UT, p. 7). But, as Laszlo pointed out in his review of Sacks’ book, “he was an Aristotelian essentialist, who became disenchanted with chemistry when he realized that it had jettisoned description and the sensory perceptions”.

For both young boys, chemistry means explosions and romantic dangers; Sacks writes that one of his earliest memories (he was two) was seeing the Crystal Palace burn, and then the fireworks every November 5th. His primordial love of fire is soon transferred to practices such as mixing iodine and zinc, or iodine and antimony, or iodine and aluminium (UT, p. 83). For Levi, the identification of hydrogen, through provoking an explosion, is among his first experiments; Sacks’ introduction to hydrogen is also dramatic and includes an explosion. His fascination with chemistry develops from the first tales about the element, through the introduction to the different elements, to nature’s building blocks and the first explosions. It then turns into an almost religious experience of awe at the discovery of the system, the periodic table that links it all together and reveals an ordered universe in which every element has its place.

In both autobiographies, chemistry as science is thus presented as an almost sacred revelation of order, of micro- and macro-cosmos, while the moment of awe is connected to the revelation of “the enchanted garden of Mendeleev” (UT, p. 194). When Sacks, at the end of his novel, interrogates himself on the profound reasons behind his abandoning chemistry, he mentions the loss of his youthful enthusiasm, the finding of stability and order, and the loss of the “lyrical, mystical perception of childhood” (UT, p. 314). Quantum calculations could not fully substitute the joy of perception. This is the emotional part of Levi’s and Sacks’s chemistry. Levi, true to himself, never treats the chemistry of tears,¹⁸ but he does describe the emotion of awe experienced while facing the revelation of the order of chemistry and while conducting experiments. To the young Levi, chemistry is an “indefinite cloud of future potentialities … like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, and in the world” (PT, p. 23). Levi describes his astonishment when he experiences the periodic table’s revelations thus: “Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed” (PT, p 41). Sacks also struggles to emphasise the altogether aesthetic and ethical beauty of Mendeleev’s table: “The periodic table was incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could never adequately analyse what I meant here by beauty – simplicity? coherence? rhythm? inevitability?” (UT, p. 203). And then, almost like a growing agnosticism in an adolescent contemplating the doctrines of religion, the young men discover the new quantum mechanics: “I had looked to chemistry, to science to provide order and certainty, and now suddenly this was gone” recalls Sacks (UT, p. 312). For Levi chemistry ceases to represent certainty and becomes another mysterious universe. “Having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions” (PT, p. 52). But for both young protagonists, there is something much worse than the disturbance of order, namely, the idea of an entirely theoretical practice of chemistry. Sacks quotes the British chemist and physicist William Crookes (1832-1919):

“Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis … We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be. “I was not sure I liked the sound of it. Did this mean that chemists in the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless, mathematical world? This, for me, seemed an awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses in the middle of the perceptual world. (UT, p. 312)

For both Sacks and Levi, chemistry is a science of Bildung because it is rooted in practice, in laboratory experiments, thus depending on human sensorial capacities. A purely theoretical chemistry would make the science less complete as a means for Bildung on the individual level.