In The Sentence Beginning In Line 33 ("He Was Young ... Garden Of Eden"), The Author Suggests That

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Monalisha Ghosh 4 Years Ago
242

 The following passage, first published in 1960, is adapted from an essay in which the author, an anthropologist, discusses his recent visit to a lake. 

 

Not long ago I visited a New England lake that has been preempted and civilized by human beings. All day long in the vacation season high-speed motorboats, driven with the reckless abandon, common to the young of our society, speed back and forth. The shores echo to the roar of powerful motors and the delighted screams of young people with uncounted horsepower surging under their hands. If I had had some desire to swim or to canoe in the older ways of the great forest that once lay about this region, either notion would have been folly. I would have been gaily chopped to ribbons by young people whose eyes were always immutably fixed on the far horizons of space, or on the dials, which indicated the speed of their passing. There was another world, I was to discover, along the lake shallows and under the boat dock, where the motors could not come. As I sat there one sunny morning when the water was peculiarly translucent, I saw a dark shape moving swiftly over the bottom. It was the first sign of life I had seen in this lake, whose shores seemed to yield little but washed-in beer cans. By and by the gliding shadow ceased to scurry from stone to stone over the bottom. Unexpectedly, it headed almost directly for me. A furry nose with gray whiskers broke the surface. Below the Whiskers, green water foliage trailed out in an averted Vas long as his body. A muskrat still lived in the lake. He was bringing in his breakfast. I sat very still in the strips of sunlight under the pier. To my surprise, the muskrat came almost to my feet with his little breakfast of greens. He was young, and it rapidly became obvious to me that he was laboring under an illusion of his own, that he thought animals and people were still living in the garden of Eden. He gave me a friendly glance from time to time as he nibbled his greens. Once, even, he went out into the lake again and returned to my feet with more greens. He had not, it seemed, heard very much about people. I shuddered. Only the evening before I had heard my neighbor describe with triumphant enthusiasm how he had killed an rcs muskrat in the garden because the creature had dared to nibble his petunias. On this pleasant shore, a war existed and would go on until nothing remained but human beings. Yet this creature with the gray, appealing face wanted very little a strip of shore to coast up and down, sunlight and moonlight, some weeds from the deep water. He was an edge-of-the-world dweller, caught between a vanishing forest and a deep lake preempted by unpredictable machines full of chopping blades. He eyed me nearsightedly, a green leaf poised in his mouth. Plainly he had come with some poorly instructed memory about the lion and the lamb."You had better run away now," I said softly, making no movement in the shafts of light. "You are in the wrong universe and must not make this mistake again. I am really a very terrible and cunning beast. I can throw stones." With this, I dropped a little pebble at his feet. He looked at me half blindly, with eyes much better adjusted to the wavering shadows of his lake bottom than to sight in the open air. He made almost as if to take the pebble up into his forepaws. Then a thought seemed to cross his mind: perhaps, after all, this was not Eden. His nose switched carefully; he edged toward the water. As he vanished in an oncoming wave, there went with him a natural world, distinct from the world of young people and motorboats... It was a world of sunlight he had taken down into the water weeds. It hovered there, waiting for my disappearance. 

In the sentence beginning in line 33 

("He was young ... Garden of Eden"), the author suggests that 

(A) in this lake, few muskrats have the chance to reach maturity

(B) an older, wiser muskrat would have learned to fear people

(C) the muskrat was only one of several types of animals living in the lake

(D) at one time the lake had been home to a variety of animals

( E) some parts of the lakes had remained unchanged for centuries 

asked Jun 24 12:00:00 AM

Monalisha Ghosh

Q: 105 A: 0

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