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He reveled in their combination of wit, moral rigor, and compactness of expression; in what he called their "intolerance of commonplaceness"; in their ability to shock one into instant argument with their author and with one's own assumptions about life.
Some show us what our American language can do, some surprise by the banality of their usage, but many amaze by the commonplaceness of their message.
Here, in the space of a few lines of dialogue, Hardy first evokes the conjunction of beauty and death both by Elfride's comments on the sunrise and by a quotation from Robert Pollock's poem "The Course of Time"; but the quotation sets in train far more mundane observations on the commonplaceness of human thought--which, in turn lead to Elfride's expression of delight at learning that Knight has sometimes been foolish--itself abruptly followed by a grim reminder of Mrs.
Commonplaceness: The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
Let us dwell for a moment on Konwicki's tendency to write about "a little bit of everything." Most of his works constitute a conglomerate of wide-ranging happenings, fellings, and thoughts; they juxtapose various temporal and spatial narrative levels, and one is left with the impression that the writer has an almost programmatic stake in presenting nothing else but the plurality of commonplaceness. As if to confirm this observation, Konwicki writes in New World Avenue and Vicinity,
Some, I know, are most taken with the Miloszian poems on historical irony, commonplaceness, and terror.
They preserve so low a tone, they are simple almost to coarseness and commonplaceness. Some one had told them what he wanted, and sent them forth with a coil of wire to make a magnetic telegraph.
The refugee crises have the potential to reveal the commonplaceness of war by making the effects of war felt in the common places of Europe and the United States.