Alexandra’s Reviews > Survival in Auschwitz > Status Update

182–183: “A friend of mine, an excellent doctor, told me many years ago: ‘Your remembrances of before and after are in black and white; those of Auschwitz and of your travel home are in Technicolor.’ Family, home, factory are good things in themselves, but they deprive me of something that I still miss: adventure. Destiny decided that I should find adventure in the awful mess of a Europe swept by war.”

…It does seem reasonable (though it’s probably not necessary) for a writer to have something else going on, e.g., a _dua metio_, in order to have stuff to write about / cross-pollination—though it doesn’t have to be so official, legitimate &/or constraining as a “real job” or _metio_, but could rather be simply an experience of some part of the world.

Note from this reader, who is also a writer: I don’t think being a manager, or even being busy, is necessarily incompatible with writing (in my case, being terribly busy has led to different kinds of writing being produced, and perhaps less of it, but à la Scott Alexander’s “Apologia pro vita sua”, it has to come out somehow). …

…But factory life, and particularly factory managing, involves many other matters, far from chemistry: hiring and firing workers; quarreling with the boss, customers, and suppliers; coping with accidents; being called to the telephone, even at night or when at a party; dealing with bureaucracy; and many more soul-destroying tasks. …

…things. I worked in a factory for almost thirty years, and I must admit that there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement. …

Levi: “I agree with you about there being only ‘one soul… and seamless’, and once more I feel grateful to you. My statement that ‘two souls… is too many’ is half a joke, but half-hints at serious…

…By the way, I am not a scientist, nor have I ever been. I did want to become one, but war and the camp prevented me. I had to limit myself to being a technician throughout my professional life.”

Levi: “My model (or, if you prefer, my style) was that of the ‘weekly report’ commonly used in factories: it must be precise, concise, and written in a language comprehensible to everybody in the industrial hierarchy. and certainly not written in scientific jargon. …

Roth: “In _The Monkey’s Wrench_ […] you tell Faussone […] that ‘being a chemist in the world’s eyes, and feeling… a writer’s blood in my veins’ you consequently have ‘two souls in my body, and that’s too many.’”

…our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old wise ones, instead of warning us ‘remember that you must die’, would have done much better to remind us of this great danger that threatens us. If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.”