Persons attempting to find a "text" in this [story] will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR - Wendell Berry's introduction to Jayber Crow.
This article was posted to Jayber on 18 January 2008 by to the following categories: Residuals.
An audio version of this article is also available.
John Maeda gave a talk at the TED conference this last year entitled "Simplicity Patterns". In the talk, he argues that we, as humans, want to reduce complexity in areas that we deem mundane, but desire complexity in areas that excite us. Also, check out his related book: The Laws of Simplicity, available for free from the MIT Media Lab. (via Jim Hoar.)