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This is a photograph of a Mister David Malouf, author of An Imaginary Life.
I feel like many of the themes within An Imaginary Life fit perfectly with what we have been discussing in class. This text seems to closely relate on many key points, but they all go back to the overriding principal, the past always possesses the present.
While the the text obviously relates to our class discussion, I wonder how An Imaginary Life compares to an ordinary life? IF we are to believe that transformation is the single most important happening within these texts, then how does this transformation interact with our everyday lives. Now, immediately I would say that it doesn't bind us on a daily basis, the idea of transformation pays respect to the grand scale of our lives.
What I mean here is, from age zero to one hundred, we transform. And generally that transformation takes time, literally the entire time were alive. In the Ovid stories of metamorphosis, the characters are born to make their mistakes, which essentially represents us as humans beings.
The retribution for these mistakes is much more instant with Ovid, bringing the faults of the characters to attention with drastic punishment in most cases. The punishments for the most part are fitting, and usually eternal, which is the same sort of thought process pushed upon us as people today. The whole, "if you do wrong, you will burn!" type sentiment.
