verb
“to take part in or experience something along with others” -Merriam-Webster dictionary
The word was encountered through the reading “Wind Sand and Stars” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The sentence that it was used in is “It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of ‘a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”
The author is trying to contribute to the idea that it takes experimentation, exploration and discovery to achieve perfection. There is a-lot of effort, trial and error to achieve a final product before the object is perfect. When he utilizes the word partakes he’s using it to talk about how machines will “take part in “the element of purity in the curve in a human breast or shoulder”. Since purity means it’s not contaminated they’re trying to say that basically it takes time and effort until a machine can become simplified and perfect. It’s when all the unnecessary and extra parts are taken away and the machine functions as it should with only the important parts.
