Chemistry Lessons

Plumbum. This was one of my favourite element names in the periodic table when I was at school: better than lead, as it is commonly known. Leaden clouds were ominous and lead bullets were harmful, but plumbum came with a quantum of danger that couldn’t be surpassed. The word plumbum was deep and carried unknown powers that were best projected when it was on its own. Compounded, plumbous and plumbic didn’t quite produce the same effect. Plumbum wasn’t matched by its poisonous counterparts; arsenic and mercury were mysterious, but not menacing enough. Plumbum was a solitary Dark Lord.

But I’ll stop here and let Primo Levi explain the properties of lead, which partly cement my assumption. It was Levi’s book, The Periodic Table, which brought back to mind my teenage fascination with the element. In an excellent paragraph, he describes the sinister attributes of lead: “…I explained that, beyond appearances, lead really is the metal of death: because it brings death; because its weight expresses a desire to fall, and falling is for corpses; because its very color is deathly pale; because it is the metal of the planet Tuisto, which is the slowest of the planets, that is, the planet of the dead. I also told him that, in my opinion, lead is a material different from all others, a metal that feels tired, perhaps tired of being transformed, and doesn’t want to be transformed anymore: the ashes of unknowable other living elements, which thousands and thousands of years ago were burned in their own fire. These are things I truly think, I didn’t just invent them to clinch the deal. That man, whose name was Borvio, listened in astonishment, and then he told me that what I said must be true, and that that planet is sacred to a god who in his country is called Saturn, and is represented with a scythe.”

I studied chemistry for seven years spread out over school and college. I had good teachers throughout, and if I didn’t make much progress in the subject, it was only because of my own ineptitude. I fell for the imaginative scope of chemistry more than the subject itself. Froth flotation was an alliterative joy; the greenish light of cathode ray experiments sounded aptly mystical for the discovery of invisible atomic particles. I loved learning about the extraction of iron and its conversion to steel. Growing up in industrial towns, I was close to the processes of magnetic separation and smelting. Alchemy was almost in the air. Everyday classes might have been mostly prosaic, but surely the heart could not help but skip a beat when it heard of halogens and noble gases, or shrink in terror when the cancerous properties of radioactive elements revealed themselves? And there were the scientists’ names too: Avogadro, Bohr, Roentgen, Curie! What kinds of lives did they live and how did they operate in a world so different from mine? As chemistry unravelled itself, the mysteries deepened. It could have provided me with enough for a lifetime of imagining, now that I think of it.

However, organic chemistry was my Waterloo. The equations and the bonds defeated me. I didn’t fare very well in the laboratory either: confronted by rows of test tubes laid out on racks across stone-topped tables, I would have liked to create magic, but just about managed to carry out the prescribed experiments. All I remember of engineering chemistry is endless sessions of titration, blowing into pipettes, and a potassium permanganate stain on my white lab coat. Things weren’t easy or fun when marks were at stake — marks that would be carefully added to the annual total, and contribute to the four-year average, which would then determine if you could appear for a written test for an IT company. (Life didn’t make much sense then, and I doubt that things have changed much now.)

Reading Levi now, though, I would like to go back to the chemistry laboratory briefly. I’d like to renew my acquaintance with gorgeous blue copper sulphate crystals, make crumbly soap, and wrinkle my nose with disgust at the rotten-egg odour of hydrogen sulphide. I wouldn’t mind carrying out a titration or two. You see, there is comfort in familiarity. Also, Levi makes chemistry sound extremely appealing, taking it beyond the uses of petroleum by-products (polishes and waxes!) to the nature of elements, and comparing their characteristics with those of people and events in his tormented life. He has made me forget the number of classes I spent in fear of being plucked out to answer a question I wasn’t prepared for, or the hours of memorising our ill-formed curriculum required. But Levi is an alchemist himself, proving there is little that expert writing and a lifetime of experiences, blended potently, cannot achieve.