the inner workings of the inner elements

Someone asked me: how do you write a post, how do the elements of it come together? (Actually, no-one asked me, but I thought it would be interesting as a second thought for my faithful and unfaithful reader(s)).

Well, I was looking for a book, 'The Common Good' by Tony Judt but my library only had a collection of his essays (in which there was a small piece on one of my favourite writers, Primo Levi). Now, since I was bored, an hour earlier I had been sifting through the cartoons of Ronald Searle (whence the Strauss). And the line I remember from his interview was:

Once you are a prisoner, you never escape being a prisoner.

Now, by one of those remarkable co-incidences I see that in the comments to the post in which this quote first appeared someone actually did ask me this question: how is a blogpost compiled! How freaky is that!

But when did it begin?

Actually, two days ago I woke up thinking: how much evil there is in the world. (Yes, I often wake up with specific phrases on the tip of my tongue or with specific images. Inspired, I know!). The medievals were surely wrong on this" evil is not just a lack, an absence of the good, but something that is real, all too real. So, this thought has been with me for the last two days, waiting for some other element to react with.

And then Ambs tells me that a teacher (if a fundo can be called a teacher) had said to an incredulous class: Hitler was right. Perhaps this was a catalyst? Are inner workings that important anyway?

But three days back I was thinking to myself: really must re-read Calvino's Six Memos (which are really five). In particular: on exactitude (since I'd written on lightness before).

There's something about Calvino's almost scientific approach (or is it a logical, impersonal style of writing?).

Then a line from the Judt essay confirmed it since it was, in effect, a word-for-word copy of Searle's thoughts.

But why write this at all? For who? Only for Ubo, my jew, who is a chemist as well...

"Zinc, Zinck, zinco: they make tubs out of it for laundry, it is not an element which says much to the imagination, it is gray and its salts are colorless, it is not toxic, nor does it produce striking chromatic reactions; in short, it is a boring metal. It has been known to humanity for two or three centuries, so it is not a veteran covered with glory like copper, nor even one of those newly minted elements which are surrounded with the glamour of their discovery.

The course notes contained a detail which at first reading had escaped me, namely, that the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered on the second, which I found more congenial."