“We know where we come from; the memories of the world outside crowd our sleeping and our waking hours, we become aware, with amazement, that we have forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in front of us painfully clear” (Pg 55).
Whenever I’m emotionally hurt or discouraged, I tend to focus my mind on a task such as working and studying because when I study hard and focus only on studying, I stop thinking about what had happened. Or sometimes when I’m stressed out, I just go out and run. When I run, all of my worries and anxieties disappear, and I don’t think about anything but force myself to just run. If I don’t do these activities like studying and running, I can’t avoid the emotional pain. This is because when I don’t do anything, I start to muse and reflect on my life and myself. Consequently, I would regret myself and become more melancholy thinking that this emotional suffering won’t fade away that easily. So it is more painful to relax ourselves than to work physically because we think more and deeply about certain things when we are physically resting. Likewise, same thing was happening to Primo Levi when he was enjoying his resting period in Ka-Be. He started to recall everything from the past and began to consider about the reality and life. Primo Levi definitely suffered much more when he was cooling himself down in the infirmary than laboring outside under a bleak weather.
