Do what is difficult because it is difficult

“Do what is difficult because it is difficult” is an imperative the narrator encounters within a broader inheritance of advice about writing and living. Its force lies in treating difficulty not merely as an obstacle to overcome, but as a reason to proceed; the surrounding reflections complicate that principle by asking what such costly demands mean in the practice of writing.

Rilke's Advice

The narrator connects the imperative to the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, a collection of ten letters addressed to a student seeking advice. Rilke was twenty-seven when he wrote them, and the narrator first read the letters at roughly the same age, feeling that their counsel spoke to her as well as to their original addressee. She has returned to them so often that she knows them by heart. Their guidance includes studying the small and humble things, resisting the search for ready-made answers, loving the questions, and seeking solitude. In that cluster, the instruction to do what is difficult belongs to an ethic of attention and persistence rather than a promise of ease or success.

Difficulty and Cost

The phrase returns beside a second imperative: “Do what will cost you the most.” The narrator frames the latter through Simone Weil's advice about making a life decision, then sets the two demands beside one another and asks, “Who were these people?” The pairing makes difficulty and personal cost sound like related tests, while leaving open what justifies accepting either one. The expression is therefore not presented as a simple rule with a settled explanation; it becomes part of the narrator's inquiry into the authority of writers whose advice can feel both compelling and severe.

Writing as a Test

That inquiry turns specifically toward writing when the narrator imagines asking Flannery O'Connor what Weil's counsel means. The next reflection sharpens the connection between difficulty and artistic work: O'Connor says that if writing were not painful, it would not be worth doing. The sequence does not prove that pain guarantees worthwhile writing, but it places the expression within a tradition that treats resistance and cost as inseparable from serious effort. Its repeated appearance links inherited advice to the narrator's own questions about what writing asks of a person.