Foreword

I began writing this project at a moment when the cultural atmosphere I lived in felt swollen with noise—everywhere, performance eclipsing substance, outrage engineered and recycled. I didn’t want to counter it. I didn’t want to rise above it. I simply wanted to step aside without hostility. Around that same moment, almost by accident, I returned to reading Chinese classical texts. I’m no scholar of them—far from it. I am only a reader who wanders through cultures the way some people wander through forests: blindly, gratefully, following whatever branch bends toward me. A book fell into my hands, Zhang Heng first, and then Qu Yuan. And there, unexpectedly, I recognized something that matched a feeling I’d been circling for years.

Li Sao revealed a gesture I instantly understood: the act of withdrawing not as surrender but as a form of integrity. The refusal to participate in a society that mistakes spectacle for virtue. Qu Yuan’s journey is not one of bitterness; it is one of alignment. A moral line held quietly, even if it leads away from one’s own city. That clarity stayed with me, and it intertwined with a different lineage I had carried for years—the European figure of the Waldgänger, the one who steps out of society’s reach to preserve an inner independence.

At some point, without forcing it, those two figures merged. The solitary forest-walker became something else: an Immortal Wanderer, someone who leaves not for purity or survival, but for the possibility of continuity—of thought, of coherence, of attention. The shift was subtle but decisive. The Waldgänger resists society; the Immortal Wanderer simply moves beyond it. He doesn’t fight the spectacle; he doesn’t even critique it. He sidesteps it like one sidesteps an unexpected tide.

This is when the lunar idea first appeared. Not as a fantasy of conquest or escape, but as an extension of that gesture of wandering. A terrain where disappearance is not erasure but a medium—almost an element. And from that, another question rose almost immediately: if one were to vanish on the Moon, how would one do it? Not metaphysically; not poetically. Materially. Physically. Logistically.

Camouflage became the spine of the project. Not as a tactic of combat, but as a language of coexistence. To live without being consumed by the observing eye. To inhabit an environment without turning it into spectacle. The regolith—devilish, electrostatic, clinging to everything—turned out to be the perfect metaphor and possibly the perfect tool. It resists us, but it also offers itself. It’s like a medium waiting for intention.

That question—how to vanish, truly vanish—intensified. I spoke with friends: astrophysicists, fabric specialists, people who understand how materials behave when pushed beyond their usual context. We wondered about the regolith’s fineness, its electric charge, its stubborn adhesion. Could it be used the way a martial artist uses the opponent’s momentum—borrowed, redirected? Could the Moon’s own dust become a technology of disappearance, an interface between the body and the landscape?

From there, the inquiry expanded. What kind of society could emerge from those who choose to leave quietly, without manifesto or rebellion? What ethos binds people who are not running away but stepping toward a different rhythm? My irritation with the world was never the true motor. What interested me was the possibility of a small community defined not by opposition, but by orientation: people whose intelligence, care, and creativity are continually flattened by the volatility of Earth’s public life, and who decide—simply—to take that elsewhere. A Pied Piper gesture, not to mislead anyone, but to reveal a path that would otherwise remain invisible.

Contradiction is unavoidable; some would say it is the system itself. I agree. But the aim is not to escape contradiction or to polish oneself into ethical purity—an impossible undertaking. Instead, the aim is to live with contradiction without being ruled by it. I have no illusions about ethical consumption or moral cleanliness on Earth; exploitation runs too deep, too quietly. But the lunar departure in this project is not a quest for purity. It is a shift in direction. A way to imagine a life that no longer depends on the approval mechanisms of the world that wounded it.

So I wrote this book as if describing an institution that already exists: a lunar space for those who do not seek applause. A place where the discipline of vanishing becomes a shared practice. I wrote it in fragments, in questions, in hesitant notes. All of it accumulated into a quiet conviction: that imagining such a place is already a form of departure.

This foreword is the threshold. What follows is not fantasy, nor prophecy, nor escape. It is an invitation to consider how a life might look when organized around discretion instead of spectacle, around presence instead of noise, around coherence instead of performance. It is the beginning of a world in which vanishing is not absence, but a form of intelligence—and perhaps the last available gesture of freedom.