A Corridor with Windows: a supressão do meio e sua cobrança (C2)
The complaint about air travel is always that it is uncomfortable, which is true and beside the point. What it removed was the middle. A journey used to consist mostly of the parts between the places, and those parts did the work of persuading the traveller that he had gone somewhere: the language in the carriage changing by degrees, the bread altering, the light arriving at a different angle by the third morning. Arrival was the last stage of a long argument. Now one sits for four hours in a corridor with windows and is delivered, at the far end, into a heat one's body has no account of. The mind has not moved. It is standing in a queue somewhere over a sea, waiting to catch up, and it will spend two days doing so while the traveller, ahead of himself, photographs a cathedral he is not yet equipped to see. We call this speed and price it accordingly. It might be better described as debt. Something is owed to the distance, and the distance is not sentimental about repayment terms; it collects, later, in the form of a fatigue that no amount of sleep resolves and that has never had a satisfactory name.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A metáfora da dívida, no fecho do texto, expressa a ideia de que
- A) o preço das passagens aéreas não corresponde ao valor real do serviço prestado, o que explica o desconforto tolerado pelos passageiros.
- B) a supressão do trajeto intermediário cobra depois um custo perceptivo, pois o corpo chega antes que a mente esteja em condições de compreender o lugar.
- C) o cansaço das viagens longas resulta de fatores fisiológicos ainda mal compreendidos pela medicina, e não da rapidez do deslocamento.
- D) as formas antigas de viajar eram moralmente superiores porque exigiam do viajante um investimento de tempo hoje considerado inaceitável.
- E) a fotografia substituiu a observação atenta dos lugares, tornando supérflua qualquer preparação prévia para a experiência da viagem.