A Letter to Ovid Critique - Essay Example

? A Letter to Ovid As an undergraduate of CMU in the year I am wondering how you knew that your work will be immortalized and your name will not be forgotten (Ovid Book 15)? How did you know that your words will be read by all the ages? While reading your book, I recognize a particular style emerging and I am prompted to ask, how did you choose which stories to include? Why, of all things did you choose to deal with change? What made you think that people would want someone to explain what life is all about? I ask because I want to understand how genius is born. While your work is largely fictional, I see some truths behind the words. And when I look at the era from whence it was written, I am amazed at your knowledge of how the world works. At this point in time when technology has allowed us to study the earth’s past and trace the evolution of various living beings on the planet, I recognize the story of creation as you narrate it in your work. You said, “One was the face of Nature, if a face: / Rather a rude and indigested mass: / A lifeless lump, unfashion’d, and unfram’d, / Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam’d. / No sun was lighted up, the world to view, / No moon did yet her blunted horns renew: / Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky, “ (Ovid Book 1). I know from science that the universe was indeed formed from Chaos. Modern scholars call this phenomenon as the Big Bang Theory. According to the theory, the universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state. The “seeds” you refer to are now called sub-atomic particles. When heated, these particles tend to move too fast, and are constantly “jarring” with each other. And so it remained in this perfect state, until several billion years ago, when the universe started to cool and these sub-atomic particles began drawing to each other. Did you know it took thousands of years for scientists to agree that this was how the universe was formed? How did you, in the early days of civilization, get an idea of the beginning of the universe? How did you discover that there was nothing – no light, and no planets? Had I not known that your work was written in 1 A.C.E., I would say that this was the written history of man and his civilization. Your description of various ages came as a shock, because in your time, you have discovered that an Iron Age will come and that during this period violence and oppression will happen, that moral bands will break (Ovid Book 1). In your work you said of the Iron Age, “landmarks limited to each his right: / For all before was common as the light” (Ovid Book 1). I know from history that when man learned to plow his fields, afterwards came private property. And when private property was formed, man had to plant and gather his own food, and sharing became almost taboo. While I realize that this happened in your time when empires were born, I see the semblance of my own world with the world you knew. In your time, private property referred only to land, but in my time, it also referred to labor and other resources. In my time, corporations ruled the world, in fact they were even more powerful than states. When there was not enough land to own, corporations propagated materialism so that people would want to own something such as a car, a house, a computer, etc. In my own time, new forms of violence have began – corporations pillaged the resources of the people. They had people work long hours and paid their workers in low wages. Because corporations paid salaries, they did not have to provide the needs of their employees. They did not have to provide food and shelter to their employees, hence allowing corporations to save. Employees of today may have counterparts during your time, slaves. These employees are “free” in that they have their own homes and they are paid money for their services, but they are no better than your slaves. Employees could not travel for leisure because they had schedules to adhere to. They worked mainly to feed and clothe themselves, and the money they earn mean could buy little else. In my time, there are now more things a person can claim as private property, but the truth is, there are very few who have the capacity to own something. Hence, like in your time, property was owned by the few people, we call them the elites, you called them as the emperor and his friends. You said, “thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold” (Ovid Book 1). I know from history that money during your time was made of gold. If I translate these last quotes to my time, I can say that steel can refer to industries and gold refers to money. Steel has enabled the creation of new materials – new forms of clothings, new gadgets, new cars – things that people will covet. Steel is cursed by my time because it distracted people from seeking the truth foretold by the gods. It has distracted people from discovering the same unity reached by the different elements which in turn created the world. I think that while people from my time claim that we are now more “civilized”, we are no better than you. The issues you faced had a counterpart in my time, though more complicated. So yes, I think that your work is a story that runs from the “world’s beginning to [my] own days” (Ovid Introduction). Ian Johnston says that your epic contains the history of human civilization from the very beginning to the death of Julius Ceasar, but for me, it is the story of the world in general. I think that it is a holon – a part of the whole which contains the whole. I think that your civilization is a prototype of my own civilization, and whatever happened to you then, will happen to me now. While your story contains suffering, death, and violence (Johnston, “Lecture on Ovid’s Metamorphoses”), I think that it is something to be celebrated because it tells us what can happen. It contains lessons for us to learn. Because you took the time to record your own experiences and that, for me, has given us a huge advantage over “fate”, if I may use that term. You see, from your work, I have realized that some things are meant to happen, and indeed, they will happen because nature has its own course. This means that no matter how we, humans (who would like to assert our “free will” or our “freedom”) struggle against the will of nature, we have to choice because nature will prevail. We can create our own illusions, but the message I get when I read your work is that, there are some things we cannot escape from. In my time, this is called a “fatalistic” viewpoint – when a person thinks that his or her life is determined by another factor other than the person’s choices. People of my time absolutely hate to be ruled by fate. In fact, in my time, God (or gods, in your time) does not exist because he exemplifies the inability of man to change the course of his own history. But for me, this is a wrong way to look at things. For me, this is the very reason why civilizations make the same mistakes over and over. People do not learn the lessons, and so when they are faced with a similar situation, they do the same thing they did before without realizing this. Hence, the cycle of life continues, and the earth fails to evolve. Metamorphosis is a term we use to refer to the process that a caterpillar undergoes in order to become a butterfly. It is the ultimate depiction of how the human spirit should flourish. The one impression I get from your work is that change is constant, man has no choice but to evolve. Over the course of the earth’s existence, we have seen the appearance of water-borne bacteria, the emergence of fishes, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals and then man. In the same way that life forms have evolved, so did the earth in order to provide the needs of every form of life that emerges. Man has not learned how to fly, but he has evolved a brain to help him innovate and create new forms unknown to nature before. Though unlike all the others whose evolution had physical manifestations, man is also evolving. What kind of evolution is man showing? Metamorphoses shows that from eaters of the fruit of the earth, man has learned to eat meat, and thus, paved way for crime (Ovid Book 15), for all sorts of abomination. But then again, I think that this is part of a bigger process. While man has created bad things, he has also enabled new, better things thing to emerge. For one, he has become aware of himself, and has began to question why he would be given “choice” when all the other animals of the planet have seemingly no choice but to follow the course of nature? Why is there a need for man to go through several civilizations only to come back to its starting point? Today, there is a call for a healthier lifestyle, a need to eradicate meat from the diet, a need to nourish the body with the fruits of the earth and the living energy of nature. I think that this is something that your civilization was most familiar with. We, the “modern” man, are opting to go back to the basics – to go back to the “primitive” lifestyle? Can this be because you were not primitive at all? But why would the universe let man destroy the earth if only to push man to search for simpler life? I think that this process is not cyclical, but rather, it is a spiral. While we may think that we are in the same level as before because we are exhibiting the same characteristics of the society, I believe that we are in a higher plain. This is because man of us have began to understand what nature is, and what the nature of man is. I think that our time is tasked at finding the purpose for the existence of humans by looking through history and discovering the patterns it has created. By discovering what this purpose is, then man can learn the direction of his evolution, and perhaps, to finally discover how the earth will evolve in response. References Johnston, Ian. “Lecture on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” Malaspina College. 1997. Print. ---. “The influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” University of Texas. 1998. Web. 21 Apr. 2012. Ovid. “Metamorphoses.” MIT Classics. 2009. Web. 21 Apr. 2012. Read More

 

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