We begin where every linear thing begins: with a direction. A vector is not a list of numbers — that is its bookkeeping. A vector is the residue of a decision, made by someone, to point at something. Once we have permission to point, we have permission to ask what we have left out. The lesson is not in the symbol. The lesson is in the small omission the symbol makes possible.
Notice how a single transformation can do the work of an entire paragraph: it picks the salient axes, suppresses the others, and renders the rest as residue. The matrix is, in this sense, a very short essay. Read it as such — for what it foregrounds, for what it crops out, for the reader it expects.
Most attempts to read a novel quickly fail not from haste but from the wrong kind of patience. The right kind sounds like waiting in a room you have never visited. You learn the light first, then the furniture, then the absences. Only at the end do you notice the door has been ajar the whole time.