Hard books should be readable.

There is a gap between wanting to read philosophy and being able to. Plenty of people own the Ethics or Being and Time; far fewer have read past the opening pages. The usual conclusion — that these books are for someone else, someone trained — is wrong.

The real wall is vocabulary. Philosophers build arguments out of ordinary words bent to technical purposes: substance, mode, a priori, Dasein. Reach for a dictionary and you get the ordinary meaning, which is precisely the one the author has set aside. Misread a dozen of those words and the book stops making sense — not because the thinking is beyond you, but because you are reading a different book than the one that was written.

Readers have always known this, and they have always built tools: companion volumes, lexicons, study guides, margins crowded with pencil. Medieval scribes glossed their manuscripts between the lines. The practice is ancient. The trouble is that it has always lived outside the page — in a second book, a second window, a second place to lose.

Be-ing builds the practice into the page. Every load-bearing term carries a gloss written for the book it sits in, one tap away in the margin. You stay in the text, the apparatus comes to you, and the hard book turns back into a book.

The name comes from the translators. When Heidegger wrote Seyn — being, spelled strangely on purpose — his English translators reached for a hyphen: be-ing, a word made strange so you would look at it again. That is the whole method, and the whole hope: slow the word down until you can finally see it.