Book Notes
If This Is A Man
Primo Levi · 1947
A firsthand account of survival in Auschwitz, written by Italian chemist Primo Levi. It's a precise and unflinching examination of what the camp system did to humans.
Passages I underlined and quotes that stuck. In the order I encountered them.
Chapter 7 — A Good Day
"For human nature is such that grief and pain - even if simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to the law of perspective" - page 79
This has me reflecting on the idea of the hedonic treadmill. The idea that individual's level of happiness, after rising or falling in response to positive or negative life events, ultimately tends to move back toward where it was prior to these experiences.
Chapter 8 — This Side of Good and Evil
"We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words 'good' and 'evil', 'just' and 'unjust'." — page 92
"Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such spiritual, physical, and even financial resources that the probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively small." — page 94
p. 122
"More generally, experience had shown us many times the vanity of every conjecture: why worry oneself trying to read into the future when no action, no word of ours could have the minimum influence?" — page 122
p. 137
"Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how come chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live." — page 137
p. 160
"Fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run away." — page 160