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  Grooks

  Piet Hein

  With the assistance of Jens Arup

  TO

  CHARLES CHAPLIN

  Table of Contents

  Atmospheric Biography

  Nothing Is Indispensable

  Time and Eternity

  Investment Policy

  A Word of Encouragement

  Largesse

  Allotment

  The Final Step

  Thoughts on a Station Platform

  An Old Saw Reset

  The Untenable Argument

  The Wisdom of the Spheres

  It Isn’t Enough

  What Love Is Like

  The Grasshopper’s Grief

  Small Things and Great

  Brave

  Abreast

  Enough

  The State

  Pow!

  Presence of Mind

  The Slot Machine

  Timing Toast

  An Echo From the Past

  Freedom

  The Arithmetic of Co-Operation

  Constitutional Point

  The Overdoers

  Making an Effort

  Rhyme and Reason

  What People May Think

  The Only Solution

  Wide Road

  When Ignorants—

  Dead Reasonable

  Reflection on Size

  A Reproof

  The Final Touch

  The Gioconda Simile

  That’s Why

  Stone in Shoe

  Like a Tall, Solid Beech Tree

  Memento Vivere

  The Unattainable Ideal

  Mean Value

  Good Advice

  The Me Above the Me

  Sub Specie—

  Who Am I?

  The Ultimate Wisdom

  Form and Material

  A Tip

  Advice at Nightfall

  Index of Titles

  Index of First Lines

  ATMOSPHERIC BIOGRAPHY:

  by way of an Introduction

  When we asked Piet Hein for some facts to constitute a short biography, his reply was to the effect that he didn’t believe in facts, he believed in atmosphere—that details were for people who don’t understand nuances. So we tried to put together an atmospheric biography from his many essays, and the numerous Interviews and articles that have appeared throughout the world.

  He started in the field of science, studying and working with things of his own at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. But ‘since science has to be misused for one of two things, the university career or technology’ and he felt that he was ‘more of a wild animal than a tame one’, Piet Hein entered the field of invention, based on scientific knowledge, but still writing essays, fables and poems on the side.

  For many years he was an acquaintance of Albert Einstein, who, intrigued by Piet Hein’s mathematically based but essentially simple puzzles, spread the word to universities and from there on to the general public. Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics, the science behind electronic brains, wrote his last book God and Golem, Inc while staying with Piet Hein in his country house in Rungsted in Denmark, and dedicated the book to him.

  Recently Piet Hein was offered the post of general secretary to an international foundation which aimed to gather Nobel Laureates and other eminences from throughout the world and put them in close contact with each other. The post carried an annual salary (tax free) of 50,000 dollars. But Piet Hein remained unshaken—‘I am a composer; I am not a conductor’ were the words he used to get the record straight.

  When the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1940, Piet Hein, at that time president of the anti-Nazi union, went underground and Invented the short aphoristic poem, the grook. With its double-edged meanings and its pithy charm, the grook seemed a fine way—possibly the only way—to say the sort of humanistic and democratic things that needed to be said. He was immediately claimed ‘a born classic’, a descendant from the writers of the Old Nordic Havamal poems. He has written over seven thousand of these to date, and has sold half a million copies of his grooks books in Denmark alone, a country with a population of less than 5 million people. Look at this in terms of the English-speaking world and you have a sale that is the equivalent of over 30 million copies.

  According to Swedish and Norwegian reviews he is ‘the most quoted Scandinavian’, a kind of unofficial (the institution doesn’t exist) Scandinavian Poet Laureate, and has often been proposed for the Nobel Prize. When Grooks finally came to be published in America they became immensely popular and were hailed in collected form as being ‘a runaway bestseller’ by the New York Times. One of the many people who reacted with great appreciation to the grooks was Charles Chaplin, with whom Piet Hein developed a close understanding.

  Piet Hein regards himself as ‘a characteristic specialist’ because he feels he applies the same kind of creative imagination to all the types of work he tackles, thus helping to bridge the artificial chasm between the humanities and the sciences.

  He interprets the enormous response to his work not as a tribute to himself so much as a highly encouraging sign that people throughout the world are wide-awake to anything that bridges the gaps in our human universe.

  The Publishers.

  NOTHING IS INDISPENSABLE

  Grook to warn the universe against megalomania

  The universe may

  be as great as they say.

  But it wouldn’t be missed

  if it didn’t exist.

  TIME AND ETERNITY

  Where the woods and plough lands

  of tradition and modernity

  run into the never-ending

  deserts of eternity,

  there I have my daily task,

  while time smoothly passes,

  spooning the eternal sands

  into hour-glasses.

  INVESTMENT POLICY

  Anxieties yield

  at a negative rate,

  increasing in smallness

  the longer they wait.

  A WORD OF ENCOURAGEMENT

  Stomach-ache can be a curse;

  heart-ache may be even worse;

  so thank Heaven on your knees

  if you’ve got but one of these.

  LARGESSE

  A grook about giving of one’s plenty

  It’s pleasant to give

  without feeling the price;

  so let us be

  nobly profuse of

  the bottomless treasure

  of moral advice

  we anyhow

  never make use of.

  ALLOTMENT

  Your days on earth

  are just so few

  that there’s exactly

  time to do

  the things that don’t

  appeal to you.

  THE FINAL STEP

  Motto: II n’y a que le dernier pas qui coûte.

  If they made diving boards

  six inches shorter—

  think how much sooner

  you’d be in the water.

  THOUGHTS ON A STATION PLATFORM

  It ought to be plain

  how little you gain

  by getting excited

  and vexed.

  You’ll always be late

  for the previous train,

  and always in time

  for the next.

  AN OLD SAW RESET

  To keep an

  ever-open door

  is wisdom’s true advancer;

  so they are fools

  who don’t ask more

  than ten wise men can answer.

  THE UNTENABLE ARGUMENT

  My adversary’s argument

  is not alone malevolent

  but ignorant to boot.


  He hasn’t even got the sense

  to state his so-called evidence

  in terms I can refute.

  THE WISDOM OF THE SPHERES

  How instructive

  is a star!

  It can teach us

  from afar

  just how small

  each other are.

  IT ISN’T ENOUGH

  One paramount truth

  our society smothers

  in petty concern

  with position and pelf;

  It isn’t enough

  to exasperate others;

  you’ve got to remember

  to gladden yourself.

  WHAT LOVE IS LIKE

  Love is like

  a pineapple,

  sweet and

  undefinable.

  THE GRASSHOPPER’S GRIEF

  A fable

  A grasshopper sat on a flagstone and wept

  with a sorrow that few surpass.

  He had painfully mastered his letters and leapt

  to a place where he knew an inscription was kept;

  and of course it said:

  KEEP OFF THE GRASS

  SMALL THINGS AND GREAT

  He that lets

  the small things bind him

  leaves the great

  undone behind him.

  BRAVE

  To be brave is to behave

  bravely when your heart is faint.

  So you can be really brave

  only when you really ain’t.

  ABREAST

  He who aims

  to keep abreast

  is for ever

  second best.

  ENOUGH

  is more than enough

  Of drink

  and victuals

  and suchlike

  stuff

  a bit

  too little

  is just

  enough.

  THE STATE

  Nature, our father and mother,

  gave us all we have got.

  The state, our elder brother,

  swipes the lot.

  POW!

  That baddies are baddies

  is only too true,

  however one studies

  the things that they do.

  But what I find sad is

  how painfully few

  have noticed that goodies

  are too.

  PRESENCE OF MIND

  You’ll conquer the present

  suspiciously fast

  if you smell of the future

  —and stink of the past.

  THE SLOT MACHINE

  A contribution to the psychology of disappointment

  Yes, life is a gamble;

  but isn’t it mean

  that you’re never the one

  to win it,

  when the thing is

  a coin-in-the-slot machine,

  and you did

  put a shirt-button in it.

  TIMING TOAST

  Grook on how to char for yourself

  There’s an art of knowing when.

  Never try to guess.

  Toast until it smokes and then

  twenty seconds less.

  AN ECHO FROM THE PAST

  Exercise for military minds

  Prehistoric monsters straying

  on a Wellsian rampage?

  Martian saucerers surveying

  their terrestrial landing stage?

  Say, what is that hideous braying,

  eloquent of fear and rage?

  Only Homo sapiens, playing

  at the pre-atomic age.

  FREEDOM

  Freedom means

  you’re free to do

  just whatever

  pleases you;

  —if of course

  that is to say,

  what you please

  is what you may.

  THE ARITHMETIC OF CO-OPERATION

  When you’re adding up committees

  there’s a useful rule of thumb:

  that talents make a difference,

  but follies make a sum.

  CONSTITUTIONAL POINT

  Power corrupts,

  whereas sound opposition

  builds up our free

  democratic tradition.

  One thing would make

  a democracy flower;

  having a strong opposition—

  In power.

  THE OVERDOERS

  Truth shall emerge from the interplay

  of attitudes freely debated.

  Don’t be misled by fanatics who say

  that only one truth should be stated:

  truth is constructed in such a way

  that it can’t be exaggerated.

  MAKING AN EFFORT

  Our so-called limitations, I believe,

  apply to faculties we don’t apply.

  We don’t discover what we can’t achieve

  until we make an effort not to try.

  RHYME AND REASON

  There was an old woman

  who lived in a shoe.

  She had so many children.

  She didn’t know what to do.

  But try as she would

  she could never detect

  which was the cause

  and which the effect.

  WHAT PEOPLE MAY THINK

  Some people cower

  and wince and shrink,

  owing to fear of

  what people may think.

  There is one answer

  to worries like these:

  people may think

  what the devil they please.

  THE ONLY SOLUTION

  We shall have to evolve

  problem-solvers galore—

  since each problem they solve

  creates ten problems more.

  WIDE ROAD

  To make a name for learning

  when other roads are barred,

  take something very easy

  and make it very hard.

  WHEN IGNORANTS—

  We’re leaving WISDOM

  to starve and thirst

  when we cultivate

  KNOWLEDGE as such.

  The very best comes

  to the very worst

  WHEN IGNORANTS

  KNOW TOO MUCH.

  DEAD REASONABLE

  »… that reason died last night at eleven. «

  Henrik Ibsen: »Peer Gynt«

  Somebody said

  that Reason was dead.

  Reason said: No,

  I think not so.

  REFLECTION ON SIZE

  Small people often overrate

  the charm of being tall,

  which is, that you appreciate

  the charm of being small.

  A REPROOF

  Grook in answer to a long explanatory letter

  In view of your manner

  of spending your days

  I hope you may learn,

  before ending them,

  that the effort you spend

  on defending your ways

  could better be spent

  on amending them.

  THE FINAL TOUCH

  Portrait of nobody in particular

  Idiots are really

  one hundred per cent

  when they are also

  intelligent.

  THE GIOCONDA SIMILE

  Certainly Leonardo’s

  magical Mona Lisa

  may be superbly rendered

  using a dozen tiles.

  Such things are not unusual.

  Yet there are those who always

  feel that there’s something subtle

  gone from the way she smiles.

  THAT’S WHY

  Why do bad writers

  win the fight?

  Why do good writers

  die in need?

  Because the writers

  who can’t write

  are read by readers

  who can’
t read.

  STONE IN SHOE

  If a nasty jagged stone

  gets into your shoe,

  thank the Lord it came alone—

  what if it were two?

  LIKE A TALL, SOLID BEECH TREE

  Spring grook

  I’m sitting with my back against

  a tall, solid beech tree,

  feeling time flowing

  in a strong, cool stream,

  feeling life rising

  like a tall, solid beech tree

  emerging from Eternity’s

  unending dream.

  MEMENTO VIVERE

  Love while you’ve got

  love to give.

  Live while you’ve got

  life to live.

  THE UNATTAINABLE IDEAL

  We ought to live

  each day as though

  it were our last day

  here below.

  But if I did, alas,

  I know

  it would have killed me

  long ago.

  MEAN VALUE

  We hope our share of luck will come

  to some unlikely maximum.

  We fear, when nightmare fears benumb,