And you would be shocked and perhaps betrayed-which was the feeling I was feeling on my first bite of quince-when you discover that this fruit is incredibly hard and incredibly astringent, it wicks all of the moisture out of your mouth. Of course you would, that's how you're used to eating fruit. If you've never had it before and someone gave you a quince, you might look at this thing, smell it, and then try to take a bite. In the case of quince for example-which is one of the fruits that brought the phrase 'difficult fruit' to mind for me to begin with-quince is this absolutely beautiful, yellow fruit with this gray fuzz on it, a wonderful combination of the masculine and feminine, and it smells amazing. I think normally when we think about difficulty when it comes to fruit, in a literal sense, usually we're thinking about whether or not it is easy to eat, so that's one kind of difficulty. It could be something that is difficult to cook, or difficult to eat. It could be something that is incredibly present in one particular geographic place but impossible to transport, or something that has no market value it so no one will transport it because it's not worth anything, which makes it rare everywhere else. In this book, difficulty can be something that is so prevalent it actually overcomes and destroys other types of fruits and the natural environment.
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