Questão de Língua Inglesa

Old Light 01. I heard a tale that the sun god was said 02. to live in a whale and that’s why light seems 03. to come out of its eyes and why rainbows 04. form in the mist of the gray whale’s breath. 05. It’s true, light comes, but it is an old light, 06. seeing. They look. The way they lift 07. themselves from the sea: they are shining, 08. water falling from them as they rise, exhale, 09. inhale and return below the surface of the 10. water. 11. The gray whales themselves are an 12. intelligence we haven’t yet grasped, Life- 13. covered with several hundred pounds of 14. barnacles and small-eyed. If we could see 15. them ........ the brief timescale of the planet, 16. they would look like shape-shifters. If we 17. thought of time by something other than our 18. own notions, million-fold years ago, before 19. our own knowledge of evolution, we’d see 20. these whales …….. they walked on land. 21. Even now, existing within their immense 22. bones, there is body evidence, a hand, 23. human; vestigial hipbones; and remnants of 24. legs they no longer need. They lived …….. 25. land when we lived in water. When we look 26. at them we see our own future. 27. And when they come up again for air 28. and the water falls from them back into the 29. seawater, it is a shine of beauty in a world of 30. desert, dunes in the background. As their 31. hind legs have disappeared into them, out of 32. our sight, and their hands have become 33. hidden, the compass set into their brains, 34. you’d think you might be able to be one with 35. them, as with a cousin, but it’s a cousin lost 36. in time. It makes us so small in the 37. firmament. It makes us remember something 38. we can’t quite name, only feel. 39. Looking at these whales in the shallow 40. water, thinking of the great turn of evolution 41. and change on earth, we wonder if one day 42. we will return to the seawater, along with 43. these long-enduring, longest-living mammals 44. on Earth. Adaptado de: HOGAN, Linda. Sightings: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2002. p. 29-30. UFRGS – CV/2017 – ING

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