Language, Perception, and Nature Theme Analysis

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.