Difficulty means separation. Inclusion, exclusion. Who's a friend, who am I, who is not I? Difficulty underwrites privacy, protecting a closely held existence against the strange weather outside. Difficulty seeds the terrain of anxiety. One mines this terrain -- treasure for friends, bombs for the unwary. The anxious pleasure of pity for the carnage. Knowledge does not lend itself to certainty; it resides rather in the "good question." The person who formulates difficult questions shares in the closed codes of the knowers, which means that he or she has friends. And at the limit, only a few, or then only one, can pose the question -- and so, back to loneliness. Where difficulty is a reaching out and a gathering in of friendship, its limit draws isolation, madness. To map and mine the difficult terrain for others to draw close in -- there lies courage, for he or she looks outward, to found the soil that others harvest, to withdraw from the myth of nourishment. 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. To train difficulty into the rote of speech wears on the ethically minded. Mythic autonomy is someone else's difficulty (Kant's?). Friendship can frame this anxiety into a question, to set madness (and courage with it) out into clean waters.