horizon to horizon and the whole arch of the sky, its quality now
the purest air, a myriad particles of light, each one a little centre
from which the whole can be grasped at a single glance (Malouf,
1978:142),
and,
I am growing bodiless. I am turning into the landscape. I feel
myself sway and ripple. I feel myself expand upwards toward the
blue roundness of the sky ... another world and another order of
existence ... I t is like the warmth of another body that has
absorbed the sun all day ... I know suddenly what it is I am
composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had
suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the
grass stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed
... I shall settle deep into the earth, deeper than I do in sleep, and
will not be lost. We are continuous with earth in all the particles
of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with
the sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and
commerce (Malouf, 1978:145-147).
I n this passage, Malouf is saying that it is not only possible for consciousness
to survive death; rather, the unbroken continuity of consciousness reveals itself as a
logical and utterly inevitable consequence of the way the world is woven. The novel
must therefore look at issues of ultimate meaning, not as abstract ideas in some
esoteric theology, but as the source of the passion that drives our, in this case
Ovid’s, life.
On the far side of the river Ovid’s attitude changes:
I no longer ask myself where we are making for. The notion of a
destination no longer seems necessary to me. I t 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 the limits of measurable time (Malouf, 1978:144).
Time and place seem to have no significance for Ovid and yet, within a few
pages, Malouf has Ovid revert to his earlier mundane perceptions and yet, the
human soul quakes when faced with the loss of its certitudes and in this especially
frightening journey of transformation, this leap into the unknown, the soul is
terrified in this unfamiliar territory, as Ovid reveals:
As the Child and I set out upon it in the moonlight the noise is
deafening, the groaning, the cracking, the grinding of the
whiteness under us. Halfway across, far out in the glimmering
waste of it, we can see nothing, neither the shore we have left nor
the one that lies somewhere ahead ... Somewhere, in the middle
of the crossing, I had the cold fear that there might be no other
shore ... But the earth goes on. Even beyond I ster. There is
another world out there ... We have come to the shores, and
prepare to enter (Malouf, 1978:137-138).