Simplicity Is The Goal, Not The Starting Point

The more experience a person has, the more simplicity is profound.
   - Keith Jarrett, improvisational pianist 

I have started the chapters you are about to read four or five times over.  I have written and rewritten them from start to finish.  Henri Matisse, according to a friend of mine who once sat for him, used to begin his drawings ten times over, throwing them into the wastepaper basket day after day, and only keeping the last in which he thought he had achieved purity and simplicity of line.  Sadly, I am not Matisse.  And I am not at all sure that my final version is the clearest, or the closest to what I think, or am trying to think.  I console myself with a remark by the English historian Frederick W. Maitland (1887) that “simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal, not starting point”.

- Fernand Braudel in The Wheels of Commerce, Civilization & Capitalism --15th-18th Century.  From the Foreword.

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
  - Dag Hammarskjöld

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