Ultima Britannia

I was thinking of home this week, but not with nostalgia. In fits and starts, I'm realising that living abroad is beginning to change how I perceive my native land and language. What is natural and familiar to me is strange and foreign to others - I should have grasped the concept of cultural relativism long ago, but there's a tangible line between theory and reality. You can't suddenly strip away a mindset and replace it with another - home is always home, as they say, and most of who I am is based on it. But now when I'm day-dreaming and come falling back to reality with a thump! it's not (always) in English - and for someone who wasn't raised bilingually, it's a strange concept to come to terms with. Home isn't just home anymore, it's some drizzly country to the North.

In my Latin class we were reading Eclogues 1, which includes the passage:

At nos hinc alii sitientis ibimus Afros,
pars Scythiam et rapidum Cretae veniemus Oaxen,
pauperis toto divisos orbe Britannos.

But we far hence, to burning Libya some,
some to the Scythian steppes, or thy swift flood,
cretan Oaxes, now must wend our way,
or Britain, from the whole world sundered far.

The lecturer commented that the representation of Britain as a far-off rock on the edge of the world was a common theme in Latin poetry, so I did a little research, yielding:

ultimosque Britannos - Catullus Carmina 11
ultima Britannia - Catullus Carmina 29
in ultimos / orbis Britannos - Horace Odes 1.35

Whereas - of course - for me Britain is home. Particularly with England, it's very difficult to associate any concept of 'wildness'. It's about as wild and mysterious as a well-tended garden. The largest natural predators are badgers. But every so often there's a glimpse of something older, bleaker, purer, and for a fraction of a second I'm part of something strange and foreign.
I'm trying to embrace this sense of being 'other'; trying to get rid of this innate patro-centricty, and the better I understand it, the better I can understand things which seem foreign to me.

This isn't the only approach; something that caught my eye recently was The Progress of Poesy by Thomas Gray - and in particular verse six, where the Muses abandon Helicon for Rome - and then England:

Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep,
Isles, that crown th' Aegean deep,
Fields that cool Ilissus laves,
Or where Maeander's amber waves
In lingering lab'rinths creep,
How do your tuneful echoes languish,
Mute, but to the voice of anguish!
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathed around;
Ev'ry shade and hallowed fountain
Murmured deep a solemn sound:
Till the sad Nine, in Greece's evil hour,
Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains.
Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant Power,
And coward Vice, that revels in her chains.
When Latium had her lofty spirit lost,
They sought, Oh Albion! next thy sea-encircled coast.

If that's true, I wonder where they are now.

Part of the sea-encircled coast.