Question

Passage

The air in the subterranean vault was kept at a constant four degrees Celsius, a temperature that bit at my fingers even through the wool liners of my work gloves. Dr. Robert Gable sat at the sorting table, his posture as rigid as the steel cabinets surrounding us. For three hours, he had not spoken, his attention entirely consumed by a tray of Astragalus seeds no larger than specks of dust. He moved them one by one with a silver probe, dividing the viable from the desiccated.

I was hired to document the archive’s collection, a task that required cataloging the geographic origins of specimens collected in the late nineteenth century. It was tedious work, but it allowed me to observe Gable’s silent crusade. The public viewed Gable as a radical preservationist, an alarmist warning of ecological collapse. The newspapers often painted him as a man obsessed with the past, standing in the way of agricultural expansion. Yet, watching him work in the dim light of the vault, I saw no grand political passion. There was only a quiet, meticulous dedication to the physical reality of the seeds themselves. To Gable, the seeds were not symbols of a lost wilderness or political bargaining chips; they were simply structures of potential, requiring order and survival.

My own role felt increasingly ornamental. While I typed descriptions of locations that had long since been paved over, Gable was actively keeping the future alive, one tiny grain at a time. I wondered if he knew that I was writing about him in my daily logs, framing his silence not as coldness, but as a form of reverence. When he finally looked up, his eyes were bloodshot. 'A century of soil,' he murmured, holding up a single dark seed. He was not speaking to me, but to the silence we shared.

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Which of the following statements best describes the narrator's point of view regarding Dr. Gable and his work?