An Argument with a Landscape: o jardim e o trabalho invisível (C2)
A garden is an argument with a landscape, conducted so slowly that both parties can pretend it is a conversation. Everything in it has been chosen, and the highest praise available to it is that the choosing should not show. We admire the border that looks as though it happened, the pond that appears to have been found rather than dug, the tree standing exactly where a tree would have stood if trees consulted anyone. In no other art is the concealment of labour so completely the point. This is why the gardener occupies an odd position in the household mythology. He is understood to be at rest — gardening is what one does to recover from work — while performing the one activity on the property that will visibly fail within a fortnight of being abandoned. The lawn is not a thing but a rate: so much cutting per week, indefinitely, in exchange for the appearance of a surface that has always been there. What the garden proposes, then, is not nature but a particular fiction about nature, in which order arises by itself and requires nobody. Half an hour of neglect is not enough to disprove it. Two seasons are, and the disproof is spectacular.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
O pressuposto ideológico que o texto expõe é o de que
- A) o contato com a natureza cultivada oferece ao trabalhador urbano uma forma legítima de descanso, ainda que fisicamente exigente.
- B) a ordem do jardim se apresenta como espontânea porque o trabalho contínuo que a produz precisa permanecer invisível para que a ficção se sustente.
- C) a jardinagem é a mais nobre das artes justamente por depender de materiais vivos, sujeitos a processos que o artista não controla.
- D) a estética paisagística ocidental privilegia a simetria e a geometria, em oposição às tradições que valorizam o crescimento espontâneo.
- E) o abandono de um jardim é reversível em poucas semanas, o que demonstra a resiliência da natureza diante da negligência humana.