2025 - 001 Musing | Here Comes Simplicity
I read an article about James Baldwin this afternoon. It’s about writing.
Although ninety-nine percent of the entire essay was already forgotten the moment I closed the page, there’s one sentence that stuck with me.
“The hardest thing in the world is simplicity.”
It stuck with me because Clarice Lispector also wrote something similar in her novel The Hour of the Star:
“Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”
The word simplicity is not a word I really paid attention to, unlike the word success, love, or nostalgia, and now, suddenly it was flung out in the open, it entered uninvited in the waters of my psyche.
And so, the questions that follow, what the fuck Baldwin and Lispector mean by simplicity? Why does it adds a layer of agony to the whippings of my Existentialist Dread?
I guess I have to re-read again my sources. LOL.