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The vivid and illuminating description of elements, materials, colours, smells, and experiments – ekphrasis – is a poetic quality found in both of the biographies. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent has stated that a principal task of chemists is to identify, name, and classify things in the world. As for the characteristics of chemistry writing, Bensaude-Vincent mentions a particular chemists’ expository style that involves shifting between levels; in chemistry books, one finds narratives from the macro-level juxtaposed with narratives from the micro-level, and a constant shifting between the levels such that the writer never settles on a single scale for reflection. Chemists, says Bensaude-Vincent, make up stories:

They make up plausible narratives to account for the properties observed in individual substances that they use, or to predict and make new substances with desired properties. In so doing, they are constantly shifting from the macroto the micro-level. … Chemistry textbooks, whether from the 17^th century or most recent ones, tend to juxtapose narratives of experiments performed at the macro-level with narratives about relationships between microscopic invisible entities. (Bensaude-Vincent, p. 169)

Chemistry’s narrative and rhetorical structures are thus based on a constant shifting between the levels, the shifting of scale, the naming and the classifying of objects, which shapes its texts and results in a particular aesthetic form. Sacks describes various elements and experiments in Uncle Tungsten, but he does not share Levi’s profoundly metaphorical and emotional use of ekphrasis. Levi’s between macro and micro perspectives throughout the novel, together with his use of ekphrasis to illustrate, explicate, and clarify the experiments and chemical compounds, makes his prose an example of the very visibility and training of the imagination that Calvino, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, sees as one of literature’s most important missions in our time. This particular rhetorical strategy of creating parallels between different levels is also closely related to the metaphorical use of the elements and the rhetorical proving of connections between a natural order and a moral order. This is where Levi excels as he oscillates between close-ups of atoms and molecular structures on the one hand, and the great philosophical questions and the human ethos on the other.

Examples of different approaches to ekphrasis can be found in the two authors’ stories about potassium. Sacks writes about potassium in his chapter on Humprhy Davy. Here we learn about the young Sacks submerging himself in biographies and chemistry books and attempting to repeat the experiments he finds in them. When he reads about Davy’s discovery of potassium and how it reacts with water, he decides to have a try for himself. The episode describes his fascination with comparing the reactions of the five members of the alkali metal family – sodium, potassium, rubidium, caesium, and lithium – and the different nature, shape, and colour of the flames they produce (UT, p. 123). Levi’s descriptions of his experiments are, by comparison, combinations of ekphrasis and sometimes awe, concluding with moral lectures.

Chemistry is the art of separating, weighing, and distinguishing; it is the search for order, to ensure our judgements are rooted in truth. The analysis is prior to the synthesis. It seems to me that Levi, in his autobiography, first and foremost explores the stamina of the researcher, the slow and meticulous analysis, the objective speculation. For instance, as mentioned above, Levi recalls his analysis of the livered paint after the war, and how he discovered what had happened and caused the damage by searching the archives of the factory. The art of distinction is of vital importance for every judgement. So when he was held captive at the Fossoli camp before being deported to Auschwitz, he longed for the chemical trade in its essential and primordial form, “the Scheidekunst, precisely, the art of separating metal from gangue” (PT, p. 137). Seen in this light, the most beautiful of all chemical operations or arts seems to be distillation, for it is a meditative activity of slowly metamorphosing matter. In the chapter dedicated to potassium, distilling is described as a philosophical occupation, a metamorphosis towards purity. It is beautiful because it repeats a ritual and thus has symbolic value, part of which is to participate in a larger community with deep historical roots:

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 vapour (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. (PT, p. 58)

When Levi writes on potassium, he recalls how he was set to purify benzene in the Institute of Experimental Physics, and how he, for lack of sodium, turned to its twin, potassium. Levi’s story about potassium is scattered with religious terms. He handles the tiny piece of potassium like a holy relic. After using it, he goes down into the institute’s courtyard, digs a tiny grave and buries its little “bedevilled corpse”. Returning to the lab, he fills the seemingly empty flask with water, but since he did not take care to remove all the liquid, a minuscule residual particle of potassium explodes and causes a fire. The lesson Levi draws from this experience contains a general moral every prudent chemist can confirm: “that one must distrust the almost-the-same … the practically identical, the approximate, the oreven, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, … the chemist’s trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences … and not only the chemist’s trade” (PT, p. 60).