Read the following passage from a short story:
"The winter at the estate was not merely a season; it was an invading autocrat, a silent Nicholas of frost that drafted the elms into rigid, gray guards and laid a heavy, ermine shroud across the dormant gardens. For Julian, this sudden arrest of the earth was a mirror to his own intellectual winter. He spent his days in the library, a vault of dead minds where the leather-bound volumes lined the walls like tombstones in a dry churchyard. He was, he felt, a modern-day Sisyphus, though his boulder was not of stone but of ink and paper—an unfinished treatise on the rise and fall of ancient empires that grew heavier with every page he turned. Each footnote was a fresh shackle, binding him to a past that had no relevance to the thaw he desperately feared yet longed for. In the evenings, his sister Clara would play the piano, the notes drifting into the library like stray autumn leaves blown into a crypt. She played Chopin, but to Julian, the music was the song of the Sirens, calling him to abandon his monument of dust and drown in the vast, formless sea of emotion. He would close his books, yet he remained motionless, caught between the gravity of his unfinished work and the perilous pull of the melody, paralyzed by the fear that to move in either direction was to invite his own destruction."
In the passage, the dual allusions to Sisyphus and the Sirens primarily serve to illustrate which aspect of Julian's internal conflict?
- AHis transition from a state of intellectual stagnation to a renewed artistic inspiration sparked by his sister's musical performance.
- BThe chronological sequence of Julian's daily routine, from his morning research in the library to his evening listening sessions in the parlor.
- His entrapment between a sense of duty to a repetitive, unproductive intellectual task and the allure of a passionate surrender that he perceives as threatening to his identity.Answer
- DThe simple classification of Julian's academic writing as a metaphorical boulder and his sister's classical music as a mythological song.
- EThe author's critique of nineteenth-century academic isolation and the historical decline of classical education.