Status Updates From The Complete Works of Primo...

If This Is a Man - reread after 30 years. And to me it is as profoundly moving and admirable as the first time I read it.

Asked by students why there are no expressions of hatred towards the Germans he answered:

I am not by nature a person easily roused to hatred. I consider it a crude and brutish feeling, and I prefer my actions and thoughts, as far as possible, to be based, instead, on reason…

Continuing slowly through Natural Histories. What strikes me most about these stories is how funny Levi is—a quality that one might not expect if one had only been exposed to his memoirs and Holocaust writing.

Reading the new translation of Natural Histories, because I really love Levi's speculative fiction

Obviously, the year of the child [1979] originated in a widespread feeling of guilt, in the awareness that to this day, even in the most advanced countries there is no feeling of reverence toward children, as prescribed by the Gospels, and that adults are preparing, for today’s children, a future full of shadows.

If today’s Germany cares about the place that it is entitled to among European nations, it cannot and should not whitewash its past. [January 22, 1987]

An Nuremberg [Albert Speer] was the only defendant to admit his guilt, even for things he did not know; indeed, precisely for not wanting to know about them.