Difficulty underwrites privacy, protecting a closely held existence against the strange weather outside.
Difficulty seeds the terrain of anxiety.
The anxious pleasure of pity for the carnage. The person who formulates difficult questions shares in the closed codes of the knowers, which means that he or she has friends. Where difficulty is a reaching out and a gathering in of friendship, its limit draws isolation, madness. To wrest oneself free from the seduction of another's difficulty, this too is a kind of courage, to face the restless sea on one's own. Yet a difficult truth presents itself, for we speak to ourselves always and are already awash with the utterances of others, the crests between them resonating speechless but unknowable.