Most of the greatest artistic achievements in life -
songwriting, non-fiction prose, poetry, painting, design - succeed not by
producing grandiose, complex outputs (although there are many exceptions, which
are obviously impressive), but by capturing simplicities that have previously
remained untapped.
You can see this wide across the artistic landscape - from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which consists of clear, direct writing that changed how people think about clarity itself, to C.S. Lewis’s brilliant Christian writings, to classic songs like Let It Be and Hallelujah, which are musically simple, lyrically straightforward, yet profoundly moving.
Brilliant but simple creativity is there awaiting discovery, and when it is produced in writing, music or other art forms, it resonates because it expresses something we all recognise but didn’t personally articulate, as we were waiting for someone else to notice it. Creativity at its finest often lies in noticing and expressing what’s already there but unseen - in distilling something vast into something simple, essential, and resonant.
And it also reminds me of the wisdom about good listening and paying attention, hearing not just what is said, but unsaid, because what is unsaid is often equally important.
