THE FUNCTION OF LITERATURE:

AN ADDRESS TO BE GIVEN BEFORE THE
INSTITUTE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES FOR EXECUTIVES
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

PROGRAM FOR JUNIOR EXECUTIVES OF THE BELL TELEPHONE COMPANIES

You are here to have emphasized to you a great natural law, and as
far as time permits, some of its implications. I speak of the law of recurrence
or of recurrences. When you have seen, and realize that you have seen the
implications of the law and how it varies without an essential change you have
become cultured and resourceful men.

It is a trick of writing to repeat what has just been said, preferably
with a slight difference, so to gain emphasis and so I repeat: The law of
recurrence is a far reaching natural law of great significance in man's affairs.
But often in the recurrence a jump has occurred to a different category of the
understanding, something has occurred which enlarges all knowledge and complicates
it so that the mind is forced to make a choice and the fat is in the fire.

We have all at one time or another, glanced inside some encylopedie of
general knowledge and seen, without understanding, some pages of intricate
mathematical formuli that have to do with perhaps thermodynamics. They are more
than most of us can grasp. We are not in the least concerned. Someone under-
stands them. If that were the end of knowledge we should feel inferior but that
is not so, other categories are open to us.

The great theoretic physicist Einstein plays the fiddle fairly well but
it is a far jump from him to Heifetz and still a greater jump to Johann Sebastian
Bach and yet it is merely a shift in the categories of knowledge that is involved.
And for every move, we are convinced, of a Bach or a Dudaist, in the pictorial