The Law of Quality and Quantity, or What Numbers Can and Can’t Describe

Before there was writing, any culture carried by language had to be transmitted orally. People memorized poems that incorporated the knowledge that was to be passed on to future generations. A poem is something made (poiein is ‘to make’), something made with words and remembered, not just words uttered for an occasion and forgotten. Now, we are accustomed to think, things have changed: there are texts and chronicles, and the art of memorization has gone almost entirely out of use. We don’t need it for the storage or transmission of knowledge, and the old chore of learning poems by heart in school has been almost entirely dispensed with. Feats of memory, outside some technical contexts (in the theater or in medicine, for example) have become curiosities, useful to intellectuals who are unexpectedly imprisoned and need something to keep them sane, but otherwise merely freakish or decorative.