Observing how he makes these sounds, and the sound of frogs, cicadas, rabbits, the low growl of wolves and their fearful baying, I get some clue at last to how he may be taught to speak. His whole face is contorted differently as he assumes each creature’s voice. If he were to speak always as frog or hawk or wolf, the muscles of his throat and jaw might grow to fit the sound, so intimately are the creatures and the sounds they make connected, so deeply are they one. It is through the structure of his own organs of speech then that he must learn to communicate. If I can reveal to him their physical shape he will discover their use.
For this reason, as I make the sounds I want him to imitate, and which he finds such difficulty in drawing up to his lips, I place his fingers on my throat so that he can hear the buzzing of my voice there, I lay his fingertips to my lips so that he can feel the shape of them, the flow of breath. Gradually, one sound at a time, we are finding human speech in him. It is a game he delights in. He is childishly eager to show me that he can imitate me as well as the creatures. With his fingertips at my lips, his brow furrowed, listening, he discovers the shape of his own lips, and the sound is almost perfect. He takes his hands from my throat and places them on his own, and laughs outright when he feels at last the same buzzing there and hears the sound; astonished at first, as if he didn’t know where it came from, then jubilant, making the same sound over and over again in his triumph, with little whoops between.
I have begun to understand him. In imitating the birds, he is not, like our mimics, copying something that is outside him and revealing the accuracy of his ear or the virtuosity of his speech organs. He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man. Speech is the essential. I have hit at the very beginning on the one thing that will reveal to him of what kind he is. In making those buzzing sounds he discovers his throat. In intoning through his nostrils he realizes he has a nose, and behind it, caverns where the sound reverberates. And so on for lips, tongue, teeth. As he builds up the whole range of sounds that we make, he is building up in his own head the image of my head, checking and rechecking with his fingertips against my throat, my jaws, my lips, that he is made as I am, that he is man. But what head is it that his imagination is creating? What is it, finally, that I can lead him to imagine and then to become?
And having built up the whole repertory of sounds, what language am I to teach him?
Meanwhile we proceed with simple manual skills. I teach him to throw and catch the ball. He is quick at this and at all body skills and soon begins to play tricks on me, perceiving that I am neither as quick of eye nor as sure of hand and foot as he is. I teach him to cast a javelin, to thread and use a needle. He himself tries to hold a stylus and make marks with it. Strangest of all, he has learned to smile. Not simply to laugh in response to some clumsiness of mine as I dart about after the ball, but to smile, as we do, out of some state of his own soul, a sudden lighting up of the spirit in him that has no object and no cause. He also assumes, on our walks, the role of teacher, pointing out to me tracks in the grass and explaining with signs or gestures of his body, or with imitation sounds, which bird or beast it is that has made them. Or finding under the mold of a log a grub or chrysalis, he explains with his hands how it will be a moth, acting out in a kind of dance its transformation. All this world is alive for him. 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. It is his consciousness that he leads me through on our walks. It flickers all around us: it is water swamps, grass clumps, logs, branches; it is crowded with a thousand changing forms that shrill and sing and rattle and buzz, and must be, in his mind, like the poems I have long since committed to memory, along with the names of a thousand gods and their fables, the rules of rhetoric, theorems, the facts of science, the facts of history, the theories of philosophers. Only for him it is a visible world he can walk through, that has its weathers and its seasons, its cycle of lives. He leads me into his consciousness and it is there underfoot and all about me. How can I ever lead him into mine?
I have come into a decision. The language I shall teach the Child is the language of these people I have come among, and not after all my own. And in making that decision I know I have made another. I shall never go back to Rome.
No doubt I will go on writing to my wife and my attorney. I shall even go on addressing Augustus, begging him to forgive my crimes and recall me. Because in one-half of my life I know that if the letter came, recalling me, I would not go. More and more in these last weeks I have come to realize that this place is the true destination I have been seeking and that my life here, however painful, is my true fate, the one I have spent my whole existence trying to escape. We barely recognize the annunciation when it comes, declaring: Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.
So I admit openly to myself what I have long known in my heart. I belong to this place now. I have made it mine. I am entering the dimensions of my self.
How all this has begun to happen is a mystery to me. It begins at first, perhaps, in our dreams. Some other being that we have kept out of mind, whose thoughts we have never allowed to come to the tip of our tongue, stirs and in its own way begins to act in us. A whole hidden life comes flooding back to consciousness. So it is that my childhood has begun to return to me. Not as I had previously remembered it, but in some clearer form, as it really was; which is why my past, as I recall it now, continually astonishes me. It is as if it had happened to someone else, and I were being handed a new past, that leads, as I follow it out, to a present in which I appear out of my old body as a new and other self.
So too, in my lessons with the Child. When I try to articulate what I know, I stumble suddenly on what, till that moment, I did not know. There are times when it comes strongly upon me that he is the teacher, and that whatever comes new to the occasion is being led slowly, painfully, out of me. We are moving in opposite directions, I and the Child, though on the same path. He has not yet captured his individual soul out of the universe about him. His self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, among leaves, water, grasses, clouds, thunder - whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit. He has no notion of the otherness of things.
I try to precipitate myself into his consciousness of the world, his consciousness of me, but fail. My mind cannot contain him. I try to imagine the sky with all its constellations, the Dog, the Bear, the Dragon and so on, as an extension of myself, as part of my further being. But my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky. It rains and I say, it rains. It thunders and I say, it thunders. The Child is otherwise. I try to think as he must: I am raining, I am thundering, and am immediately struck with panic, as if, in losing hold of my separate and individual soul, in shaking off the last of it from the tip of my little finger, I might find myself lost out there in the multiplicity of things, and never get back.