Out of The Silent Planet “Then something happened which completely altered his state of mind. The creature, which was still steaming and shaking itself on the back and had obviously not seen him, opened its mouth and began to make noises. This in itself was not remarkable; but a lifetime of linguistic study assured Ransom almost at once that these were articulate noises. The creature was talking. It had a language. If you are not yourself a philologist, I am afraid you must take on trust the prodigious emotional consequences of this realization in Ransom's mind. A new world he had already seen - but a new, an extra-terrestrial, a non-human language was a different matter. Somehow he had not thought of this in connection with the sorns; now, it flashed upon him like a revelation. The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”
As a philologist, Ransom is familiar with the expressions and messages encoded into linguistics. This quote was interesting to me because when Ransom had just begun to make his peace with the fact that he was in an entirely different world, separate and mysterious to everything he had once known; he was faced with a new kind of life. How alarming would it be to be transported to another world? I can imagine that if I were on another planet, that would be strange and frightening enough. But to suddenly be faced with new life- a kind of life with we I could not communicate and control- I would run the other way. Ransom sees this creature making noise and begins to recognize that it is not just another animal, a creature to be subdued by man; but instead a power far greater than he.
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