Читать книгу Literature and Chemistry - Группа авторов - Страница 32

In the preface to Other People’s Trades from 1985, Levi looks back on his career and states that he has travelled as a loner, “examining matters of technique with the eye of a literary man, and literature with the eye of a technician” (Other People’s Trades, vii). Levi’s objective prose and his use of metaphors and analogies from the craft of chemistry are undoubtedly among the most appreciated qualities of his texts. Underlying this descriptive and associative prose we find a project of ethical writing, where the techniques of analysis and synthesis and the particular narratives of chemistry used to account for the properties of the substances serve as intellectual tools. This is the point where the differences between the books are clearest, since Sacks’ approach to chemistry is more theoretical than Levi’s. Sacks is a collector, while Levi is a narrator of encounters and failed encounters with matter. But in spite of the many, and fundamental, life stories in The Periodic Table and in Sacks’ Uncle Tungsten are both seen and represented in the light of the history of chemistry, while the trade and art of chemistry is strongly perceived as a means for representing life in a way that enables the senses, hands, emotions, and cognition to intersect.