"It's just so—" He gestures vaguely, unable to properly articulate his difficulty. "Imagine that you want to learn to read, but there is no such thing as a letter or a word, only entire books set out all of a piece. The finest of scholars can discern with careful study which part of the book is written on a particular page, and use that understanding to create new books. Except that it would not take me ten centuries in that scenario to figure out how letters worked."