Passage (Henry David Thoreau, *Walden*, 1854, Ch. II "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"): "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." The clauses "if it proved to be mean... if it were sublime" function principally to:
Aargue that life is more likely to prove mean than sublime.
Bapologise for the speculative nature of Thoreau's project.
Canticipate two opposite possibilities and signal Thoreau's willingness to face whichever turns out to be true.
Dpropose two competing experiments Thoreau will run in successive years.
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: C. anticipate two opposite possibilities and signal Thoreau's willingness to face whichever turns out to be true.
Thoreau frames his project as one of *finding out* the character of life, **whichever it turns out to be**: if mean, he will *publish its meanness to the world*; if sublime, he will *give a true account of it*. The pair is presented in **parallel structure** without favouring one outcome, signalling that his commitment is to *experience the truth* rather than to *predict the result*.
- **A** misreads the paired structure as predicting an outcome. Thoreau gives equal grammatical weight to both possibilities.
- **C** is wrong — Thoreau is not apologising but committing.
- **D** mistakes the alternation for sequential experiments.
The rhetorical move is classic: *whether X or Y, my response is constant*. The point is to dramatise Thoreau's openness to the truth of life rather than to any pre-formed thesis about it.
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