'Already!'

At last we came in sight of the coast [...]

Immediately everybody was happy [...]

I alone was sad, inconceivably sad. Like a priest whose God has been snatched from him, I could not without heartbreaking bitterness tear myself away from the sea, so monotonously seductive, so infinitely varied in her terrible simplicity and seeming to contain and to represent by all her changing moods, the angers, smiles, humors, agonies and ecstasies of all the souls who have lived, who live, or who will someday live!

In saying farewell to this incomparable beauty, I was sad unto death; and that is why when all my companions were saying, "At last!" I could only cry, "Already!"

—Charles Baudelaire, "Already!" Paris Spleen (1869) (trans. Louise Varèse 1947)

'that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see'

Today, anyone wishing to enter the Church of Jesus' Nativity in Bethlehem will find that the doorway five and a half meters high, through which emperors and caliphs used to enter the building, is now largely walled up. Only a low opening of one and a half meters has remained. The intention was probably to provide the church with better protection from attack, but above all to prevent people from entering God's house on horseback. Anyone wishing to enter the place of Jesus' birth has to bend down. It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our "enlightened" reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God's closeness. We must follow the interior path of Saint Francis, the path leading to that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see. We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions, the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby.

—Pope Benedict XVI, homily on Christmas Eve 2011 (official Vatican translation, 2011)

'It has taken me thirty years to come to simplicity.'

It has taken me thirty years to come to simplicity. Earlier, I made a lot of what I thought were beautiful shots with much backlighting and many effects, absolutely none of which were motivated by anything in the film at all. As soon as we had a painting on the wall, we thought it should have a glow around it. It was terrible and I can hardly stand to see my own films on television anymore. I look for two minutes and then I thank God that there is a word called simplicity.

—Sven Nykvist, quoted in "Shooting With Ingmar Bergman: A Conversation with Sven Nykvist" (AFI 1984)