Wit & Attitude Quote by Primo Levi

Levi’s sentence lands like lab work delivered as moral warning: memory is “marvelous,” yes, but also “fallacious,” an instrument that performs and misperforms at once. Calling it an instrument matters. Instruments don’t merely store reality; they measure it, translate it, and introduce their own distortions. In Levi’s hands, that metaphor quietly refuses the comforting idea that remembrance is a sacred archive. It’s closer to a device with known error rates - and the honest user factors that in.

The rhythm of the line mimics the process it describes. First, erosion: memories “become erased.” Then the darker twist: they don’t just fade, they mutate. Levi’s most unsettling claim is not that we forget, but that we can gain detail: memory “increase[s]” by absorbing “extraneous features.” That’s how personal mythologies are manufactured - not through lies in the blunt sense, but through narrative drift, retellings that sand down ambiguity, and the social pressure to make experience legible. The word “incorporating” is surgical; it suggests a body taking in foreign material until it can’t easily be separated from what was original.

Context makes the stakes acute. Levi, a chemist and a Holocaust survivor, is writing against two threats at once: denial from outside and self-deception from within. The subtext isn’t “don’t trust testimony”; it’s “treat testimony with rigor.” He’s insisting that bearing witness requires humility about the witness-bearing apparatus itself - because the most dangerous fictions are the ones memory helpfully supplies while convincing us they were there all along.