10.

knowledge of fruit flies may lead us to think of human needs and values at
the level of the fruit fly. A knowledge of the domestic arrangements of ancient
Shelley's
Egyptian royal houses, or of Snoddons notion that incest is the most poetic
of subjects, may lead us to a new admiration of the goings-on of the Jukes
and Kallikaks. And a knowledge of the structure of the atom may lead us
unhappy
to destroy ourselves. I say that knowledge may lead to such unpكهak
conclusions. But need it? And if it does, must we blame knowledge? No,
we should blame incompleteness of knowledge — the fact that knowledge of
human nature and values has not kept pace with knowledge of fruit flies and
atoms. And so we have the New Man with the Old Heart — and Old Head.
He has not achieved balance and responsibility in the ever-unfolding process
of self-definition.

Each of us longs for full balance and responsibility, for full self-
knowledge in a sense of destiny being harmoniously fulfilled. Saints and
sages may achieve that harmony in a sense of destiny, or the hero at the
cannon-mouth. But we lesser and more fumbling mortals may find at least
some intimation of it in the unfolding pattern, however modest, of our
efforts toward knowledge.

I know that this is a congress of philosophers, and I have a becoming
diffidence about offering my amateur and home-made product after the three-
day exhibit of the glittering store-bought and professional articles. In fact,
if I am invited here at all, it is not with the credentials of one who
tries to philosophize but of one who tries to write novels and poems. And that
would suggest that the thing I was supposed to do in the first place was to
remark on what relation I find between my own profession and the topic of
this meeting. But there is no reason to suppose that a novelist knows what
novels signify in the great scheme of things, any more than there is reason
and invert
to suppose — and I steal a piece of wit from my friend Randall Jarrell —