Grooks Read online

  Grooks

  Piet Hein

  With the assistance of Jens Arup

  © 1966 Piet Hein

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Atmospheric Biography

  Ars Brevis

  Problems

  The Eternal Twins

  Consolation Grook

  T. T. T.

  Omniscience

  Simply Assisting God

  Hint and Suggestion

  Mankind

  Naive—

  The Miracle of Spring

  Dream Interpretation

  Prayer

  Circumscripture

  Social Mechanism

  A Toast

  On Problems

  An Ethical Grook

  Lilac Time

  The Double-Door Effect

  Foretaste With Aftertaste

  Majority Rule

  Experts

  Atomyriades

  Road Sense

  Our Noblest Achievement

  The True Defence

  Past Pluperfect

  My Faith in Doctors

  Defence Wanted

  Getting Down to Fundamentals

  Grook to Stimulate Gratitude

  Missing Link

  The Road to Wisdom

  That Is the Question

  Bridge or Tunnel?

  Losing Face

  A Psychological Tip

  More Haste

  A Word to the Wise

  Meeting the Eye

  If You Know What I Mean

  The Case for Obscurity

  Lest Fools Should Fail

  Grook on Long-Winded Authors

  Out of Time

  An Ode to Modesty

  The Cure for Exhaustion

  I’d Like—

  A Maxim for Vikings

  Making Sense

  A Moment’s Thought

  Living Is—

  Index of Titles

  Index of First Lines

  FOREWORD

  I first met Piet Hein in charming Copenhagen many years ago. So it is not so surprising to me as it may be to others to find a book of short epigrams in poetic form written in English by a Dane.

  Piet Hein is a many-sided man. He began as a scientist. He has been called a poet, a city planner, a mathematician, and a philosopher. In response to a call for help from planners redesigning the central zone of Stockholm he invented a new geometric shape, the ‘super-ellipse’. As if all this were not enough he has devised some splendid table games.

  ‘Grooks’. Piet Hein told me that he invented the word. ‘Grooks’ is evidently a better name than ‘Illustrated Rhymed Epigrams’ which is what they are. I know little about drawing, and I am Inclined to suspect what is called ‘economy of line’: but I know a good deal about the writing of verse. I have even, though rarely and cautiously, attempted the rhymed epigram, which is a most hazardous enterprise. It must have wit, or wisdom—preferably both—compressed into a tiny space, yet perfectly intelligible. Your obscure ‘modern’ will write no memorable epigrams. Then it must have rhyme and it must scan. All this is formidable enough if you are writing in your own language. It is like (I imagine) being asked to do a graceful dance in corsets and a crinoline. To try it in someone else’s language you must be a hero: to bring it off you must be pretty good. Piet Hein gives himself another restriction—he avoids the long rolling line the master Belloc used:

  The accursed rule that rests on privilege

  And goes with women, champagne, and bridge:

  Broke, and Democracy resumed her reign

  Which goes with bridge, and women, and champagne.

  Hein is content with short lines:

  Who am I

  To deny

  That maybe

  God is me?

  Or—a great truth here:

  To be brave is to behave

  Bravely when your heart is faint

  So you can be really brave

  Only when you really ain’t.

  Or:

  If no thought

  your mind does visit

  make your speech

  not too explicit.

  Naturally, not every card in the pack is an ace, but there are lots of aces: and I am proud to welcome Piet Hein to this part of Anglo-Dania.

  A. P. Herbert

  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.

  ARS BREVIS

  There is

  one art,

  no more,

  no less:

  to do

  all things

&
nbsp; with art-

  lessness.

  PROBLEMS

  Problems worthy

  of attack

  prove their worth

  by hitting back.

  THE ETERNAL TWINS

  Taking fun

  as simply fun

  and earnestness

  in earnest

  shows how thoroughly

  thou none

  of the two

  discernest.

  CONSOLATION GROOK

  Losing one glove

  is certainly painful.

  but nothing

  compared to the pain

  of losing one,

  throwing away the other,

  and finding

  the first one again.

  T. T. T.

  Put up in a place

  where it’s easy to see

  the cryptic admonishment

  T. T. T.

  When you feel how depressingly

  slowly you climb,

  it’s well to remember that

  Things Take Time.

  OMNISCIENCE

  Know what

  thou knowest not

  is in a sense

  omniscience.

  SIMPLY ASSISTING GOD

  I am a humble artist

  moulding my earthly clod,

  adding my labour to nature’s,

  simply assisting God.

  Not that my effort is needed:

  yet somehow, I understand,

  my maker has willed it that I too should have

  unmoulded clay in my hand.

  HINT AND SUGGESTION

  Admonitory grook addressed to youth.

  The human spirit sublimates

  the impulses it thwarts;

  a healthy sex life mitigates

  the lust for other sports.

  MANKIND

  Men, said the Devil,

  are good to their brothers:

  they don’t want to mend

  their own ways, but each other’s.

  NAIVE—

  Naive you are

  if you believe

  life favours those

  who aren’t naive.

  THE MIRACLE OF SPRING

  We glibly talk

  of nature’s laws

  but do things have

  a natural cause?

  Black earth turned into

  yellow crocus

  is undiluted

  hocus-pocus.

  DREAM INTERPRETATION

  Simplified.

  Everything’s either

  concave or -vex,

  so whatever you dream

  will be something with sex.

  PRAYER

  to the sun above the clouds.

  Sun that givest all things birth,

  shine on everything on earth!

  If that’s too much to demand.

  shine at least on this our land.

  If even that’s too much for thee,

  shine at any rate on me.

  CIRCUMSCRIPTURE

  As Pastor X steps out of bed

  he slips a neat disguise on:

  that halo round his priestly head

  is really his horizon.

  SOCIAL MECHANISM

  When people always

  try to take

  the very smallest

  piece of cake

  how can it also

  always be

  that that’s the one

  that’s left for me?”

  A TOAST

  The soul may be a mere pretence,

  the mind makes very little sense.

  So let us value the appeal

  of that which we can taste and feel.

  ON PROBLEMS

  Our choicest plans

  have fallen through.

  our airiest castles

  tumbled over,

  because of lines

  we neatly drew

  and later neatly

  stumbled over.

  AN ETHICAL GROOK

  I see

  and I hear

  and I speak no evil;

  I carry

  no malice

  within my breast;

  yet quite without

  wishing

  a man to the Devil

  one may be

  permitted

  to hope for the best.

  LILAC TIME

  The lilacs are flowering, sweet and sublime,

  with a perfume that goes to the head;

  and lovers meander in prose and rhyme,

  trying to say—

  for the thousandth time—

  what’s easier done than said.

  THE DOUBLE-DOOR EFFECT

  Double doors are justified

  because they’re comfortably wide.

  Therefore you only half undo’em;

  and therefore nothing can get through ‘em.

  FORETASTE WITH AFTERTASTE

  Corinna’s scanty evening dress

  reveals her charms to an excess

  which makes a fellow lust for less.

  MAJORITY RULE

  His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,

  and there were more of them than of the others.

  That is. they constituted that minority

  which formed the greater part of the majority.

  Within the party, he was of the faction

  that was supported by the greater fraction.

  And in each group. within each group, he sought

  the group that could command the most support.

  The final group had finally elected

  a triumvirate whom they all respected,

  Now of these three, two had the final word,

  because the two could overrule the third.

  One of these two was relatively weak,

  so one alone stood at the final peak.

  He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair

  which formed the most part of the three that were

  elected by the most of those whose boast

  it was to represent the most of most

  of most of most of the entire state—

  or of the most of it at any rate.

  He never gave himself a moment’s slumber

  but sought the welfare of the greatest number,

  And all the people, everywhere they went,

  knew to their cost exactly what it meant

  to be dictated to by the majority,

  But that meant nothing,—they were the minority.

  EXPERTS

  Experts have

  their expert fun

  ex cathedra

  telling one

  just how nothing

  can be done.

  ATOMYRIADES

  Nature. it seems, is the popular name

  for milliards and milliards and milliards

  of particles playing their infinite game

  of billiards and billiards and billiards.

  ROAD SENSE

  God save us, now they’re murdering

  another winding road,

  and another lovely countryside

  will take another load

  of pantechnicon and car and motorbike.

  They’re busy making bigger roads,

  and better roads and more,

  so that people can discover

  even faster than before

  that everything is everywhere alike.

  OUR NOBLEST ACHIEVEMENT

  We must expect posterity

  to view with some asperity

  the marvels and the wonders

  we’re passing on to it;

  but it should change its attitude

  to one of heartfelt gratitude

  when thinking of the blunders

  we didn’t quite commit.

  THE TRUE DEFENCE

  The only defence

  that is more than pretence

  is to act on the fact

  that there is no defence.

 
; PAST PLUPERFECT

  The past,—well, its just like

  our Great-Aunt Laura.

  who cannot or will not perceive

  that though she is welcome,

  and though we adore her.

  yet now it is time to leave.

  MY FAITH IN DOCTORS

  My faith in doctors

  in immense

  just one thing spoils it

  their pretence

  of authorised

  omniscience.

  DEFENCE WANTED

  In International

  Consequences

  the players must reckon

  to reap what they’ve sown.

  We have a defence

  against other defences,

  but what’s to defend us

  against our own?

  GETTING DOWN TO FUNDAMENTALS

  It will steadily shrink,

  our earthly abode,

  until antipode stands

  upon antipode.

  Then, soles together,

  the planet gone,

  we’ll know the ground

  that we rest upon.

  GROOK TO STIMULATE GRATITUDE

  in sour rationalists.

  As things so

  very often are

  intelligence

  won’t get you far.

  So be glad

  you’ve got more sense

  than you’ve got

  intelligence.

  MISSING LINK