"In the beginning there was the exception," Isaac Bashevis Singer told 150 people in Cabot Hall last night.

The Yiddish writer read an essay and his latest short story--a spare and gentle account of an American Jew's visit to his Polish parents--answered questions, and expounded an aesthetic theory in which "the essence of fiction is the study of character and individuality."

"The artist's object is not humanity but a single person, not an example but a unique item in the history of mankind," Singer said.

"If Newton would have found that only apples are attracted to the earth, this would not be science, but if the artist finds out about only one apple, he has done a good job."

Singer warned against art which strays too far from storytelling--"the artist is an entertainer in the highest sense," he said--and against the acceptance of restrieve aesthetics that "would reduce fiction to a toy and a sport for amateurs--we have seen it happen to poetry already."

"In Chelm they called water sour cream." Singer said, "but this did not make their blintzes more tasty. In art as in sex, the act and the enjoyment go together."

Singer defined talent as "an innate and relentless urge to brood about the eternal questions, a refusal to accept human and animal suffering--so that the artist is never a collectivist, but always unique."

"He is never an atheist," Singer continued, "for by his very nature he must grapple with higher powers. He may revile God but he cannot deny him."

Because humanity continues, Singer said, art will too. "A young artist cace came to me and told me he was afraid he hadn't suffered enough," he went on.

"I told him a story," Singer continued. "I once went into a tailor's in Warsaw and asked for a cost with crooked pocket. He told me I didn't need to ask, I could ask for straight pockets and they should still be crooked."

"In the same way," he concluded, "since humor, for instance, is based on suffering, we will have humor for million years.