Daodejing LXXI

To know yet to think that one does not know is best,

Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

It is by being alive to difficulty that one can avoid it.  The sage meets with no difficulty.  It is because he is alive to it that he meets with no difficulty.

What is this game the Dao plays in its heavenly caprice?  What sort of deception does the sage play with knowledge and masks and is knowledge itself a mask and, if so, a mask for what?

Is being alive to difficulty difficult?  Or is it simply becoming alive to difficulty that's difficult?  Are these pieces of knowledge that if one might be acquainted with them one should think one isn’t?

If the sage is alive, she is alive to the relation between knowing and not-knowing, a relation which may be a kind of thinking, an orientation of mind, yet it seems as if the kind of thinking required to transmute not-knowing into knowing may be different than the kind of thinking required to transmute knowing into not-knowing and, if this seeming is so, is the difference in kind also a difference in difficulty and being or becoming alive?

And, in summary (if we can speak of summarizing when there is hardly anything to summarize), is the above questioning—its nature and function—itself, in part at least, a function of the sage saying—or at least the Dao saying or writing or it having been said in the Dao—she meets with no difficulty:  that the rooted speaking of the phrase permits the avoidance and the being and becoming and being alive?