By STANLEY M. ARONSON, The Providence Journal

To write simply, said Somerset Maugham, is as difficult as to be good. And therefore simplicity in writing is not a task to be left for the ambitious nor a chore relegated to a random Sunday afternoon.

Every hospital has one. It is a consciously undistinguished space located between the main lobby and the operating suite. It generally contains a dozen or more chairs -- frayed from much use -- and a coffee table strewn with last year's golfing magazines and travelogues for Hoboken, N.J. The walls are of an inoffensive, neutral color designed to encourage neither exultation nor despair.

To a dweller in a temperate-climate nation, the word tsetse has relevance solely when confronting crossword puzzles. To those living in sub-Saharan Africa, however, it defines a terrible human misfortune and is an alternate name for the devil incarnate.

Some madnesses are episodic, unpredictable and part of the bewildering fabric of history, but other madnesses are totally contrived by humans and have now become so ingrained in our culture that they appear to have been operative since the dawn of civilization.

Ask teen-agers to identify the text site of any line in Ecclesiastes and few would succeed. But ask them to tell the origins of "Play it, Sam," and many could tell you precisely in which scene of the movie "Casablanca" it was uttered. Motion pictures, whether on a large silver screen or on a TV set, remain a major instructor of our young as well as their elders.