The world is never just one version

What is reading for?

And what is learning a foreign language for?

For a long time I've felt these two are really the same question.

Both of them do a very strange thing:

they take a person out of their own world.

Read the Divine Comedy, and you find that Dante imagined life as a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

You don't have to believe him.

But you have now seen a kind of life that had never existed in your mind before.

Before Jung, you might have thought a dream was just a dream.

After The Red Book, the next strange dream may hold you for a few seconds longer.

Why this person?

Why this place?

Why do I still remember it after waking?

The book gave you no answer.

It only made you start asking questions you never used to ask.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is more troubling.

You had assumed beauty was something to be preserved.

Mishima puts beauty and destruction side by side.

From then on, whenever you see something too beautiful, an uncomfortable question may surface:

why do I want to possess it so much?

That is probably what I love about reading.

It doesn't necessarily make things clearer.

Sometimes it does the opposite.

It makes what was clear become troublesome.

Later, when I started learning foreign languages, I realized that the most direct way to leave your own world is to leave your own language.

Chinese has no word that quite catches the Japanese 「懐かしい」.

It isn't simply "nostalgia."

It holds the feeling of the past drawing close to you again — and the quiet knowledge that it will never return.

A single word is enough to show you:

a feeling, too, can have another shape.

So you keep reading, listening, speaking.

Some things feel natural in your own language and suddenly strange in another.

Some things are hard to say in your own language and become uncannily precise in another.

You begin to see that the things you take for granted are not necessarily natural.

You have just always lived here.

So what is reading for, in the end?

I don't know whether there is a standard answer.

But I increasingly feel that at least one thing matters:

to learn that what I take for granted is not, in fact, granted.

None of us chose our language at birth.

Nor the first stories we heard, the values we believed, the beauty we knew, or the way we learned to understand the world.

They arrived so early that we easily mistake them for the world itself.

A book lets you live for a while inside someone else's mind.

A language lets you step outside your own.

A poem, a painting, an unfamiliar era — each can take you somewhere you would never otherwise go.

You don't have to stay.

You don't even have to believe what you find there.

But you have seen it.

And that is already enough to change something.

Which is also why I want to build Lucerna.

Not because there are too few books.

There have always been many.

But because between books, too much goes unseen.

One book can lead to another literature.

A single word can lead to a way of living.

An unfamiliar era can suddenly explain a feeling you have today.

Someone who seems entirely unrelated can meet another person, centuries apart, somewhere in the middle.

What I want to do is simply light these paths.

To let you leave your own world once in a while.

And then come back

carrying something unfamiliar.

Because the world has never had just one version.