[I believed] that the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the […]
All posts found when searching for primo levi
The Drowned and The Saved by Primo Levi (1986)
This book means to contribute to the clarification of some aspects of the Lager phenomenon which still appear obscure. It also sets for itself a more ambitious goal: it will try to answer the most urgent question, the question which torments all those who happened to read our accounts. How much of the concentration camp […]
Posted by Simon on July 27, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/07/27/the-drowned-and-the-saved-primo-levi/
Moments of Reprieve by Primo Levi (1986)
After Levi had written and published If This Is A Man and The Truce in the late 1950s/early 60s, he thought he’d done his duty – in them he had borne public witness to the misery and evil of Auschwitz concentration camp (where he was incarcerated from February 1944 to January 1945) and exorcised his own […]
Posted by Simon on July 26, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/moments-of-reprieve-primo-levi/
The Truce by Primo Levi (1963)
It was the shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections [for the gas chamber], and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime […]
Posted by Simon on July 25, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/the-truce-primo-levi/
If This Is A Man by Primo Levi (1947)
They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is […]
Posted by Simon on July 24, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/if-this-is-a-man-primo-levi/
If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi (1982)
The Lord our God, the King of the World, had divided the waters of the Red Sea, and the chariots had been engulfed. Who would divide the waters before the Jews of Novoselki? Who would feed them on quails and manna? No manna descended from the black sky, but only pitiless snow. (p.65) Primo Levi […]
Posted by Simon on July 19, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/07/19/if-not-now-when-primo-levi/
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2023 @ the Photographers’ Gallery
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is not an open competition which anyone can apply to, like the BP Portrait Award or the Royal Academy Summer exhibition. The exact opposite: the curators choose just four finalists from what they consider to have been the best photographic exhibitions staged by individual photographers, in Europe, in the […]
Posted by Simon on May 22, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/22/deutsche-borse-photography-prize-2023-photographers-gallery/
Introductions to the Aeneid – 2. Allen Mandelbaum
I own three English translations of the Aeneid: the 1956 Penguin classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight the 1970 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum the 1991 Penguin classics prose translation by David West This is the middle of three blog posts giving detailed analyses of the introductions to each of these translations. This one […]
Posted by Simon on September 9, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/09/introductions-to-the-aeneid-2-allen-mandelbaum/
Arrival and Departure by Arthur Koestler (1943)
Warning: This review contains disturbing content about sexual violence and the Holocaust. Arthur Koestler, a potted biography Arthur Koestler was born to a Jewish mother in Budapest, capital of the Hungarian part of the the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1905. So he was 14 when the short-lived Hungarian communist government of Bela Kun seized power in […]
Posted by Simon on June 26, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/arrival-and-departure-arthur-koestler/
The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw 1939–45 by Władysław Szpilman
Władysław Szpilman was born to Jewish parents in 1911 in Warsaw. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland 28 years later, in August 1939, Szpilman was already an accomplished classical pianist who worked giving live recitals on Warsaw Radio, as well as writing his own compositions. This memoir was written immediately after the war, in 1945, and […]
Posted by Simon on May 28, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/28/the-pianist-wladyslaw-szpilman/
Books & Boots 