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The True Language
The gods represent transcendence from an individualist mindset and acceptance of the naturalistic worldview that the true language imparts. Ovid lives most of his life as a rationalist and a skeptic, resisting belief in any gods that might demand more of him than his preferred frivolous lifestyle. However, Ovid always feels a part of him is drawn toward such belief. When Ovid arrives in Tomis, he dreams that the gods that look like horsemen meet him on the river and swirl around him, begging him to believe. Although Ovid refers to these beings as “gods” in the moment, as he gradually comes to understand the unity of all things, he realizes that his gods are not classical deities. Rather, they are the animals and the plants that surround him, that give him sustenance and will take their sustenance from his body after he dies. As such, the gods that approach Ovid in his dream are not asking for devotion to a deity, but rather asking him to accept the transcendent reality that he is just one organism in the vast sea of nature, a single element in the universe, interconnected and interchangeable with all others. Although this understanding of the gods does not involve a particular afterlife, Ovid feels that he still lives on after death as his body decomposes and rejoins the natural world. In Ovid’s final moments, when he knows he is dying, he feels that he both “ascends” and “lowers” himself into the ground simultaneously. As his body breaks down, he places himself in “the hands of the gods.”
The Gods Quotes in An Imaginary Life
The An Imaginary Life quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Gods. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
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.
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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.
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Chapter 2
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My life has been so frivolous. Brought up to believe in my own nerves, in restlessness, variety, change; educated entirely out of books, living always in a state of soft security, able to pamper myself, to drift about in a cloud of tender feelings, and with comfortable notions of my own intelligence, sociability, kindness, good breeding; moved by nothing I couldn’t give a name to, believing in nothing I couldn’t see.
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Of the the two of us it is my brother who should have survived. I am the frivolous one, who will achieve nothing in the world. It is my brother who would have saved the last of our lands, won important public office, done all a good son can be expected to do in the way of piety toward his family gods. I know this is true and feel my life, my whole body’s weight in the saddle, as a burden.
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Chapter 3
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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.
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Chapter 4
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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?
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Chapter 5
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From here I ascend, or lower myself, grain by grain, into the hands of the gods.
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The Gods Symbol Timeline in An Imaginary Life
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Gods appears in An Imaginary Life. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...onto the river. Horsemen ride out of the sky, whom Ovid recognizes as all the gods he does not believe in. They implore him to let them cross his river and...
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...the new “national style,” which is a rejection of patriotism, militarism, and belief in the gods, who no longer seem necessary. Emperor Augustus created a society that was “orderly” but “dull.”...
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...their way to Rome. He reflects that the landscape one feels was “given” by the gods, “ready-made in all its placid beauty,” is in fact only made by men. When one...
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...remarks, “Our bodies are not final,” but moving from form to form, until men become gods. He imagines the end of all things, “the earth transfigured and the gods walking upon...
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Chapter 2
...himself, learned from books, rejected anything that he could not understand, and believed in no gods. By contrast, the headman moves slowly and powerfully, and seems to embody a gentle but...
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...extends to the Child as well, if they believe him to be some sort of god or spiritual creature. Ovid simply wants to know that the Child survived the winter, and...
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Chapter 3
...even momentarily feels sincere about the ritual, then it will be a sign to the gods (that he claims not to believe in) that he is replacing his brother, and his...
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Chapter 4
...his dreams of crossing the river to dig his own grave, or to meet the gods in the form of horsemen. Ovid is going into the “unknown,” into the “clear path...
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Chapter 5
...world entirely—perhaps the villagers were right to believe the Child was a “foundling of the gods,” more than human.
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...to forage as usual. Ovid imagines that he both “ascend[s]” and “lowers [him]self” into the gods’ hands, in the place he’d often dreamt about. Looking back, he considers that every event...
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