A Document We May Not Read: fundação inacessível do eu (C2)
Consider the arrangement's chief absurdity: the years that are said to make the person are precisely the years the person cannot attend. Everyone agrees these months are decisive — the attachments formed, the grammar absorbed at a speed no adult can approach, the first settled opinion about whether the world catches what it drops — and everyone agrees that not one hour of it will be recoverable by the individual concerned. We are each of us founded on a document we are not permitted to read. What fills the gap is testimony, which is a poorer instrument than it pretends. A family assembles a version: the child was placid, the child was difficult, the child once did the funny thing at the seaside. These few anecdotes, repeated at intervals, harden into what a person believes about his own beginning, and they were selected by tired adults for their usefulness at dinner. So the self arrives with a foundation it cannot inspect and a history composed by others for entertainment. It is remarkable, given this, that anyone develops a stable idea of who they are at all — and less remarkable, perhaps, that the idea, once acquired, is defended with the ferocity we normally reserve for things we cannot prove.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A conclusão do texto relaciona a inacessibilidade da primeira infância
- A) à necessidade de que as famílias registrem sistematicamente os primeiros anos, suprindo com documentos a falha natural da memória humana.
- B) ao caráter fabuloso das anedotas familiares, que deveriam ser descartadas por qualquer indivíduo interessado em conhecer-se com rigor.
- C) à superioridade da aquisição linguística infantil sobre qualquer aprendizado adulto, fato que explicaria a estabilidade posterior da identidade.
- D) à intensidade com que o adulto defende a própria imagem de si, precisamente por ela repousar em testemunho alheio e não em prova verificável.
- E) à impossibilidade de qualquer autoconhecimento, uma vez que toda percepção de si deriva de impressões inevitavelmente falseadas pelo tempo.