the translator ◉

someone made a list of modern thinkers and traced each one back to the ancient idea they were really channeling — stoicism, christianity, zen, utopianism — name after name, each one essentially a translator hired by a different century. and most of them probably didn’t know they were translating. they thought they were discovering. but the ideas were already there, patient as geology, just waiting for someone fluent enough in the current moment to say them again. no one invents gravity. you just find the words your generation will believe it in. which means originality might be less about having new thoughts and more about having old thoughts at the right time, in the right mouth. the ideas don’t belong to anyone. they just pass through, like light through glass — every new pane bends the color slightly, but it was always the same light.