Iron and Nickel

 

Recently I re-read two 'stories', Iron and Nickel, from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table – I can’t remember how long ago it was that I last read this book – I didn’t have a clear recollection of either story, so I must have read them too quickly.  The book was a very early edition given to me by a house-mate in about 1983.  Both stories in different ways are absolutely wonderful, essential reading for everyone, as Saul Bellow says on the cover.  Nickel is interesting but Iron is both moving and inspiring. The two stories, in different ways, bear on my focus of interest these days, about practice being the point of interaction between humans and the world, and the (for Levi, always moral) implications of this for the way we understand what happens to us, what we decide to do, and how we make the best of things.  The name Nickel comes from the German for ‘little devil’…. – this section reminds me of an powerful episode in the amazing tour de force historical novel by Neil Stephenson, Quicksilver, an episode which takes place in the silver mines of Germany at the dawn of the modern age, and that the word dollar comes from thaler, one of the early modern currencies, that name deriving from the German word for valley (thal).

Topics for imminent posts

• The past is orange: if William of Orange had not died childless, would the UK and Holland now be one country?

• Private schools: the most important way to reduce class-based unequal outcomes in schools is to abolish private education. So argued an articulate working class teenage girl from Kirby, Lancashire, last week on John Humphreys' documentary.

• In a keynote speech during his visit to the UK last week, the Pope asserted that 'morality is founded on religious belief': most commentators failed to question this. Do you have to believe in a God to lead a good life?

• Incentive payments to achieve targets can actually make results worse: see a recent animated lecture on the RSA website.

• 'Most people can do most jobs' (Richard Sennett): talent is not scarce, and we need our education and training systems to stop operating as if it is.