It has become almost a (0) REFLEX among critics to apologise for the difficulty of the books they admire, as though obscurity were a regrettable tax one paid for greatness. This is, I think, the wrong stance entirely. Some works are difficult because their authors have failed to command their material, and such difficulty is a vice; but there is another kind, by a thousand lesser examples, in which the difficulty is inseparable from what the work has to say. The reader who through such a text cannot report, afterwards, that it was hard but rewarding, as if the hardness were a detachable skin surrounding a softer truth. The difficulty was the truth, or at any rate the only in which the truth could be transmitted without distortion. To complain of such a book's difficulty is like complaining that a mountain is hard to climb: the climbing is not a regrettable of the view but the condition under which the view is earned. This does not mean that every obscure book repays the effort it demands. Most do not, and a certain discrimination remains necessary. But the of difficulty in advance — the preference for books that flatter the reader with their accessibility — forecloses precisely the experiences that reading, at its best, is uniquely fitted to provide. A culture that will not its books to be hard will find, eventually, that its books have nothing left to teach it. The of easy reading is, in the long run, the loss of the harder reader we might have become. This is perhaps the case against the apologetic critic: not that she is wrong about the difficulty, but that she mistakes the difficulty for the defect, when it is in fact the price and the point.