When the Roman Emperor Augustus exiles the poet Ovid to a small remote village called Tomis, Ovid must learn to speak an entirely new language. Although Ovid initially finds the villagers to be barbaric and strange, as he slowly absorbs their language he begins to understand how they see the world, which contrasts drastically with his own worldview. After learning the village language, Ovid again learns a new “language” when he meets the Child, a feral boy who grew up in the wilderness alone, and who knows how to speak to wild animals. As the Child teaches Ovid to understand this unstructured “true language,” Ovid comes to see the natural world in an entirely different way. Through Ovid’s journey, Malouf argues that one’s language shapes one’s perception of the nature, and that a universal language exists which could heal humanity’s relationship to the natural world.
Although Ovid originally only speaks Latin, as he learns Tomis’s language he discovers that each way of speaking results in an entirely different outlook, suggesting that one’s language shapes their worldview. Ovid describes Latin as a “language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides.” Latin is well-suited to describing “the rules of rhetoric, theorems, the facts of science, the facts of history, the theories of the philosophers.” That is, Latin is an orderly, meticulous language that separates, organizes, and explains. As such, the precision and categorization inherent to Latin gives Ovid an analytical outlook toward the world around him. He thinks of himself as an individual being, and life as something to be organized, controlled, and explained. However, as Ovid learns the villagers’ language, he realizes that their folklore is blunt and direct, “explain[ing] nothing, but speak[ing] straight out of the nightmare landscape of this place,” which reflects their view of the world as “bare, cruel, terrible, comic,” but without grander meaning. Rather than try to order and analyze the world, as Ovid’s Latin does, the village language simply “presents the […] raw life and unity of things.” Through the perspective of the villagers’ language, life is no longer something to control and explain, but something to accept and endure. Ovid reflects, “Seeing the world through this other tongue I see it differently. It is a different world.” His original worldview markedly contrasts with the view that the villagers’ language reveals to him. This suggests that different languages, varying in both form and structure, fundamentally alter one’s worldview.
As Ovid learns the villagers’ language, he begins to view his relationship to nature differently as well, suggesting that language shapes one’s understanding of one’s place in the natural world. The Latin language’s tendency to separate and organize leads Ovid to initially see himself as superior to the natural world, and nature as something to be tamed. Ovid spends most of his pre-exile life in Roman cities, where nature is domesticated and controlled. He reflects that a sophisticated country like Italy with its “placid beauty” is a “created place” that humans shaped and mastered. In his mind, nature is only valuable or beautiful when a human being controls and cultivates it. Ovid’s view of nature as something to be conquered and organized reflects Latin’s propensity for categorizing and arranging ideas. By contrast, Tomis’s language, with its tendency to simply observe and describe life rather than control it, leads the villagers to accept the harsh natural world around them. Rather than build cities and cultivate agriculture (ways of conquering nature) the villagers shape their lives according to nature’s patterns: sleeping in winter, foraging in spring and summer, and hunting in autumn. Consequently, as Ovid understands the villagers’ language, he internalizes their belief in cooperating with the natural world. Though he once hated the untouched, barren landscape around Tomis, he begins to recognize the subtle beauty of it. The contrasting views of humanity’s relationship to the natural world reflects the different perceptions that each language creates. This further suggests, then, that a person’s language shapes one’s understanding of one’s place in nature—whether one choose to submit oneself to it or to dominate it.
The Child teaches Ovid the “language” of nature and animals, which challenges Ovid’s distinction between human beings and the natural world. Through this natural, unstructured language, Malouf suggests that a universal language exists which can help humanity rediscover their harmonious relationship with nature. The Child, who knows no human language, teaches Ovid how to speak to animals like birds, wolves, and insects. Ovid realizes that rather than just mimicking their calls, the Child, “in entering the mysterious life of its language, becomes, for a moment, the creature itself.” Ovid sees that the Child does this with all of nature—when a storm blows in, the Child thinks “I am thundering,” rather than that there is merely thunder in the sky. As opposed to the Latin-style distinction between oneself and the world, the Child’s language leads him to view himself as indistinct from his natural environment. Eventually, Ovid begins to understand this “unstructured” language himself and realizes he is not an individual, separate from nature, but just a piece of it like the wind and the grass. Ovid reflects that this new language “is a gesture of reconciliation,” since through it, he no longer thinks of himself as a separate being, or nature as something to dominate and control. He is one part of a whole, whose will return to the earth and decompose to feed the soil. Malouf thus extends his argument about language and perception to suggest that a natural universal language exists, and could reshape people’s perspectives and teach them to view the world as a harmonious, interconnected whole. Ovid states, “We knew that language once. […] We must discover it again,” suggesting that this view of the world is inherent to humanity, but that the sophisticated language of society causes one to separate oneself from the natural world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Language, Perception, and Nature ThemeTracker
Language, Perception, and Nature Quotes in An Imaginary Life
Must it all be like this from now on? Will I have to learn everything all over again like a child? Discovering the world as a small child does, through the senses, but with all things deprived of the special magic of their names in my own tongue?
I stood silent in the center of the plain and [the horsemen] began to wheel in great circles about me, uttering cries—not of malice I thought, but of mourning. Let us into your world, they seemed to be saying. Let us cross into your empire. Let us into your lives. Believe in us. Believe.
Do you think Italy—or whatever land it is you now inhabit—is a place given you by the gods, readymade in all its placid beauty? It is not. It is a created place.
Does the boy watch all this, I wonder? And what does he make of it? What species does he think he might belong to? Does he recognize his own?
The old man’s stories are fabulous beyond anything I have retold from the Greeks; but savage, a form of extravagant play that explains nothing, but speaks straight out of the nightmare landscape of this place and my dream journeys across it […] I begin to see briefly, in snatches, how this old man, my friend, might see the world. It is astonishing. Bare, cruel, terrible, comic.
I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. The animal’s face leads toward me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished.
I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation.
He is not at all beautiful, as I had imagined the Child must be. But I am filled with a tenderness, an immense pity for him, a need to free him into some clearer body, that is like a pain in my own.
All that will tie him to us, a new life, is invisibly there, he must feel it: the web of feeling that is this room, the strings—curiosity, a need to find out the usefulness to him of all these objects that surround him, and the way they define and illuminate the uses of his own body—these are the threads that hold him now, and along which his mind must travel to discover how he is connected to us.
I too know all the boundary stones of our land, but to me they mean something different. They are where the world begins. Beyond them lies Rome and all the known world that we Romans have power over. Out there, beyond the boundary stones, the mystery begins.
All this world is alive for [the Child]. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read.
Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back—not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves.
The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.
All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my own will, a figure in my dream. Now, as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me. I have no notion of what pain he is suffering, what deep sense of loss and deprivation his cries articulate.
What else should life be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful setting out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become […] What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?
The days pass, and I cease to count them. The river is far behind us. […] I no longer ask myself what we are making for. The notion of a destination no longer seems necessary to me. It has been swallowed up in the immensity of this landscape, as the days have been swallowed up by the sense I now have of a life that stretches beyond measurable time.
From here I ascend, or lower myself, grain by grain, into the hands of the gods.
