Teeth and Handshakes: sentimento como sintoma de obsolescência (C2)
My grandfather could estimate a horse's age by its teeth and a man's by his handshake, and he trusted the first method more. He had been among the last of a line for whom the animal was infrastructure rather than sentiment: it ploughed, it hauled, it went to war and did not come back, and when it grew useless it was disposed of with a practicality that would now be filmed and condemned. I have wondered whether his refusal to be moved by horses was a kind of respect. Sentiment, after all, is what we award to things we no longer need. The animal survives into our century as a luxury, a therapy, a photograph, kept alive by the very affection that marks its redundancy; nobody weeps over a machine while it is still doing the work. Once, on a road above his farm, one came alongside the car, unhurried, and I saw the whole scale of the thing at eye level: the barrel of the ribs, the working of the shoulder, the animal indifference of the eye. It occurred to me that our ancestors had measured distance in this creature, and courage, and rank; that whole vocabularies had been built on its back; and that it had never once been consulted.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
O paradoxo formulado pelo narrador consiste em
- A) a afeição hoje dedicada ao cavalo funcionar como sinal de sua dispensabilidade, uma vez que o sentimento só é concedido àquilo que deixou de ser necessário.
- B) o avô ter sido cruel com os animais e, ainda assim, ser lembrado pelo neto com uma admiração que o texto não consegue justificar.
- C) o cavalo ter perdido utilidade prática justamente quando a linguagem passou a depender das metáforas construídas a partir dele.
- D) a memória do narrador ser mais confiável quanto aos detalhes anatômicos do animal do que quanto aos fatos verificáveis da vida do avô.
- E) a modernização mecânica ter melhorado a vida dos animais de trabalho ao mesmo tempo que empobreceu a vida rural que os sustentava.