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
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.
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,