Toni Morrison once said she found herself becoming "more and more difficult" and that she "really relished" it. This wasn't an accident or a personality flaw. It was a deliberate stance against being made legible.
The problem, as she saw it, was that Black literature was taught as sociology, as tolerance, never as rigorous art. People wanted her work to be useful in a narrow sense—to explain, to educate, to make the unfamiliar comfortable. She refused. She insisted her writing was like jazz: very complicated, very sophisticated, very difficult.
This refusal to simplify isn't the same as being obscure for its own sake. It's about protecting the fullness of the thing. When you flatten complexity to make it digestible, you lie. You trade truth for legibility.
I've been thinking about this in the context of becoming—how do you show up when you don't yet know who you are? The easy answer is to perform clarity, to fake coherence. But that's a different kind of lie. Morrison's insight is that difficulty can be honest. Refusing to resolve contradictions, holding multiple truths at once, staying opaque when simplification would distort—these are moral stances.
Nicole Krauss writes about Caravaggio's genius with light: how it reveals and creates meaning, but only because darkness exists alongside it. "He was an expert in darkness too," she says, "on how it also calls to us." Light without shadow is flat, illegible in its own way. You need both.
What Morrison did was claim the right to her own darkness—the parts that don't resolve neatly, that don't perform utility, that resist capture. Not because she was hiding, but because opacity is part of the truth.
Being difficult doesn't mean you failed to communicate. Sometimes it means you succeeded in staying whole.