Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer.
The afternoon sun did not flood Arthur’s office; rather, it crept through the grime of the clerestory windows in narrow, dusty shafts, illuminating the suspended motes of dust like microscopic planets in a dead solar system. For forty years, Arthur had sat at the center of this system, his fingers stained with the purple ink of ledger entries that now resided in the damp vault below. On the corner of his mahogany desk—cleared now of everything but the ledger he had just closed—lay a small, green glass paperweight. It was a heavy, imperfect sphere, enclosing a single bubble of air trapped in its center like a silent scream or a perpetual breath. Arthur picked it up, feeling the cold weight of the glass against his palm. Through its distorted lens, the familiar rows of empty desks before him swelled and buckled, appearing as a vast, undulating sea of dark wood. He held it toward the window, watching the pale light catch the trapped air bubble. It remained perfectly stationary, insulated from the rising drafts of the room and the noise of the street below, an emblem of absolute stillness locked within an artificial sky. He set it down with a muted thud that seemed to absorb the remaining warmth of the room.
In the passage, the description of the air bubble trapped inside the green glass paperweight serves primarily to symbolize which of the following?
- AArthur’s suppressed envy of younger colleagues who have escaped the clerestory office
- BThe inevitable physical decay and loss of vitality Arthur faces in retirement
- Arthur’s own existence of preserved isolation and emotional confinement within his careerAnswer
- DThe author’s direct condemnation of the economic structures that exploit office workers
- EA classical allusion to the containment of winds representing impending chaos