Still on the First Page: permanência contra a narrativa do progresso (C2)
There is no dignity in the crocodile and this, I suspect, is why we cannot forgive it. Our affection for animals is calibrated to a scale we invented, on which the noble occupy the summit and the merely persistent are placed somewhere near the drains. The creature fails every test on that scale. It does not run down its prey across a plain, providing a spectacle; it waits, at length, in warm water, with the metabolic ambition of a submerged log, and succeeds. Endurance has never had a good press. Yet its record is the one no mammal can approach: a design so early and so sufficient that the intervening extinctions have amounted, for it, to weather. This is the offence. We narrate the history of life as a story with a direction, and the crocodile is a sentence from the first page still sitting in the middle of the paragraph, unedited, refusing to be a stage in anything. Notice how the language reaches for insult — primitive, prehistoric, a living fossil — as if the animal had failed to keep an appointment. It kept the only appointment that matters. The rest of us are still auditioning for the part of the successor.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A crítica implícita no ensaio dirige-se
- A) à narrativa da vida como progresso orientado, que trata a permanência de uma forma antiga como atraso em vez de sucesso.
- B) ao descaso das políticas de conservação com espécies que não despertam simpatia estética no público em geral.
- C) à imprecisão dos termos científicos usados para classificar répteis, que confundem antiguidade evolutiva com simplicidade anatômica.
- D) à preferência humana por predadores velozes, cuja caça oferece espetáculo, em detrimento de estratégias de emboscada mais eficientes.
- E) à ideia de que a nobreza atribuída a certos animais teria origem em hierarquias sociais transpostas do mundo humano para o natural.