Been reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus the past few days and your comment reminded me of the beginning (quoting from memory, not exact words) - "this book will perhaps be understand only by those who've already had the thoughts expressed in it or similar thoughts" :)

Emacs kind of gives me that same vibe. I used it for many years to organize my research but still have a hard time remembering key strokes and such .. though i dont have a similar issue with vim whose modal interface I find rather pleasantly compositional. So I get both the sense of power and flexibility, and the chaos of it.