Science Quote by Primo Levi

Levi makes “home” refuse the usual metaphors of comfort and belonging and instead pins it to something more stubborn: the body. To live in a house as in one’s skin is to admit, without sentimentality, that attachment is partly biochemical. You don’t pick your epidermis; you don’t really pick the first architecture that contains your life, either. The line’s quiet provocation is that taste is irrelevant to a deeper loyalty. There are “more beautiful” and “more ample” options out there, he concedes, even “more picturesque” ones - a word that smuggles in the tourist’s gaze, the fantasy of a better backdrop. Then he punctures it with “unnatural,” turning what could be a lifestyle choice into something closer to an ethical or physiological violation.

The scientist’s voice matters: this is observation, not romance. Levi doesn’t claim his house is best; he claims the act of trading it would feel like transplanting oneself into a more attractive body. The subtext is identity as lived continuity, not aspiration. Coming from a writer whose life was defined by forced displacement and the industrial assault on the body, the metaphor lands with extra weight: after Auschwitz, the skin is not an abstract symbol but the site of vulnerability, survival, and ownership. His refusal to “exchange” reads as a small, defiant reclamation of agency. It’s also a skeptical jab at the modern appetite for reinvention. Levi insists on the dignity of the given, not because it’s ideal, but because it’s yours, and choosing otherwise risks making life into costume.