Covered by a Thumb: o avião e a escala perdida (C1)
The first time I flew I was eleven, and I spent the whole descent trying to find our house. What I remember is not the view but the discovery that everything I considered enormous — the river, the bus route that took an hour, the distance between my school and my grandmother's street — had been folded into a single window and could be covered by a thumb. I was not delighted. I was insulted on behalf of the walking I had done. Aeroplanes are usually praised for shrinking the world, and the phrase is exact in a way people rarely intend. They do not move us closer to places; they remove the middle, and the middle was where the sense of scale lived. Twenty years later I fly often and notice nothing. That, I think, is the real cost, and nobody warns you about it: not that the distance disappears, but that you stop being able to feel that it ever existed.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A afirmação "I was insulted on behalf of the walking I had done" revela que o narrador
- A) sentiu-se envergonhado diante dos adultos por ter atribuído importância excessiva a trajetos que qualquer pessoa consideraria banais.
- B) percebeu que sua experiência corporal de distância havia sido desautorizada por uma nova escala visual, que reduzia a esforço irrisório o que ele vivera como grandeza.
- C) rejeitava o transporte aéreo por razões éticas, já que ele suprimia o contato com as comunidades atravessadas durante a viagem.
- D) temia que a facilidade dos deslocamentos aéreos tornasse desnecessário o hábito de caminhar, prejudicando sua saúde no futuro.
- E) compreendeu naquele instante que a memória da infância é sempre exagerada e que suas medidas subjetivas nunca corresponderam à realidade.