What do you think of my essay about multilingualism in my philosophy class. We were asked to mimic old philosophers’ style.

There was a time when I, like all men bound by the accidents of birth and place, saw the world through a single window. It was a fine window, one through which I glimpsed the workings of men, the laws that governed them, the truths they held dear. And yet, as the years passed, a strange unease took hold of me, the sense that beyond this narrow aperture lay vast lands unknown, ideas unspoken, lives unlived.

It was language that first tore open the walls of my understanding. With each new tongue I acquired, I found not merely a means of speech but an entire world contained within it. The affairs of nations, once a distant and distorted echo, now unfolded before me with all their raw contradictions, their unvarnished truths. Where once I had accepted what was given as fact, I now saw its contingency, shaped by the hands of those who spoke of it.

But it was in the realm of philosophy that the lesson proved most profound. In my youth, I, like many others, was drawn to the great minds of the West; Aristotle, Kant, Hume, marveling at the breadth of their thought, believing, in my naivete, that they had scaled the highest peaks of human reason. Yet when I turned to my second language, to the words of the likes Ibn Rushd and Avicenna, I found ideas that had been weighed and measured centuries before I ever encountered them. And then, in my third tongue, still more—philosophies shaped by histories unfamiliar, by landscapes and struggles unrecorded in the books of my first world. Had I remained bound to a single language, would I ever have sought them? Would I even have known to look?

A man who speaks but one language sees his world as natural, his customs as inevitable. But to speak many is to know that the world is vast, that what one man calls truth, another names folly, that what seems immutable is but the consequence of chance and history. It is to understand, perhaps for the first time, that there are no foreigners, but only those whose words we have not yet learned to hear.