You gain some, you lose some
There is a certain tension between the beauty in acquiring knowledge and the loss of innocence that comes with the acquisition. Understanding always diminishes authority – that’s why it’s so much more difficult to rule and or influence thinking people and why all tyrannies’ favorite pastime is executing intellectuals.
This point comes across most poignantly in all matters pertaining to language – your language. One appreciates things truly either when they are lost and gone, or when there is a contrast. Anyone who has tried to integrate him/her self into a different culture and language after having reached puberty knows what I a talking about.
Knowing additional languages is very neat. It’s comforting, as a matter of fact. That comfort comes from the foreign language being an addendum to your understanding. When you make it a primary language , it’s a wholly different ball of wax. I don’t know what it is exactly – I assume the mother tongue gets extremely closely associated with childhood impressions – but the point is, whenever you truly try to switch to another language as the primary mode of perception, reality becomes a very tepid affair. Literally – nothing seems real. At that point you assume that only your mother tongue has the quality of conveying reality (if you have a modicum of intelligence you quickly disabuse yourself of that notion).
If you persist, eventually reality begins to shine through the acquired language, although never as brightly and luminously as the mother tongue. What’s freaky is when you realize that the mother tongue, that irreducible epistemological primary is no different from any other language. This does not happen often, but it does happen. It happens if you study your mother tongue too closely – going into the deep structure. It happened to me, and it was really, really disturbing. Second year of graduate school brought with it yet another semester of linguistics. After a while, I could hear myself think and analyze the words. All of a sudden the rules that caused some consonants to soften and others to become voiced would ring in my head. It seemed that my primary apparatus of both perception and communication was a dry machine (which it is), rather than the live thing I always felt it to be. Words were not longer monoliths of meaning, but rather the results of formulas. Reality lost some of its sheen.
When we are children we accept authority more easily than when we are adults – everything is sort of towering over us and exudes authority. Then we learn how to tell the world to fly a kite. The interesting thing is that whenever we do that, we never again can have the same feeling of security and comfort from the knowledge that something right is being done for us, through a process which is fundamentally outside our ken (more often than not, it is something wrong through a process which is easily understood). The loss of comfort is exchanged for a degree of control over our environment. A truly deep understanding of the latter brings new comfort through the ability to predict and control. I think that a great deal of our mythology and mysticism is conjugated with that sense of irrevocable loss – the garden of Eden and the like that is lost for us when we taste the fruit of knowledge. I think that the core of it is how language and reality are perceived.
5:11:37 AM 
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