Word: piet
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...designating some portion of their wages for the credit union. Result: the wages were duly deducted for the credit union-then transferred for payment as union dues, saving face all around. Such conciliation would be far easier if adversaries would only heed the aphoristic advice of Danish Scientist-Poet Piet Hein...
...Piet is unable to refuse an encounter. At the end of the book he has been drained of all sense of choice, of free action. His will has been sacrificed to the author's formulation. It is perhaps this sense of authorial intrusion that is the novel's main flaw, that accounts for its lack of expansiveness, its lack of extended meanings, its lack of resonance...
...times the sea was steely purple, stained; at others, under a close warm rain sky, the no-color of dirty wash; choppy rows hurried in from the horizon to be delivered and disposed of in the lick and slide at the shore. Piet stopped to pick up angel wings, razor clam shells, sand dollars with their infallibly etched star and their considerate airhole for an inhabiting creature Piet could not picture...
Updike's prose is, like Proust's, imbued with a sense of loss, with a profound perception of the evanescence of things, analogous to Piet's fear of death. It is this that drives Updike to greater and greater feats of observation. Everything, all the world's shapes and colors, must be preserved in words, as in amber, against its eventual decay and disappearance...
...attention to it, paying homage to the world, preserving it, transfiguring it, declaring it all worth saving. One can quote at random from his novel, for every page has gems of observation, rhythmic and charming passages of prose. Only the transcribed stream-of-consciousness of Piet is ever dull or banal...