The idea of austerity stayed with him: "I find beauty in plainness," he said, "in a conception that is precise".
For a slightly more removed experience, you can sit (or lie) on dark-stained benches — similar in plainness to the tables — that line the side walls and, from there, observe the dispersed activities or listen to a radio.
"I have wanted," said President Young, "to fast thirty days, and to clothe my house in mourning, but business must be driven, and as it falls to my lot to speak, I shall speak in plainness.
In terms reminiscent of a 17th-century Puritan tract writer, Williams constructs a plea for simplicity, for an older set of American values that emphasise plainness and a lack of ostentation, which chimes well with the poet's work.
A woman had been created in her plainness, in an identity she shared with a hundred nearby neighbors, ?her energy and in her fatigue, in the person that was a person and yet only a statistic.
It's a restrained, taut piece in three continuous movements, almost ritualised in its plainness, and tremendously powerful in effect.
His plain style is unostentatious even in its plainness, avoiding musical balance but also taking care not to seem mannered or excessively clipped.
But there's power in his plainness.
"Of course, the beauty of my upbringing was in its plainness," he writes.
In its plainness and honest depiction of ordinary lives, it's the painting that most nearly resembles his fiction.
The spare immediacy of Hong's style reverses this trajectory: it approaches, in its plainness, an amateur's inspirations.
