The meaning of ‘wilfully insist on conscience’
The meaning of ‘wilfully insist on conscience’
The passage below is from Fathoms: The World in the Whale Hardcover by Rebecca Giggs.
Elsewhere in the world, the extant art of early cultures has tended to be preserved in sites that are challenging to access: remote sea caves acrid with guano, and dry, windless rock-shelters found at dizzying altitude, above the clouds. Yet, the fact that the Australian petroglyphs extend into urban areas — and though they are inscribed not in subterranean grottos, but, more typically, onto open-air platforms — does not mean they are all prominent. Where land meets sea, tides capriciously pull sediment up over the carvings, concealing them until the right hour comes to sluice back, leaving a residue of white sand settled in the grooves. Rumours circulate of mansions with trapdoors and panes of glass inset into basement floors, displaying animals imprinted on the foundation stones. In the midst of a drought, a petroglyph will sometimes swim out from under a recoiling lawn, as if to wilfully insist on conscience.
First question.
In the sentence before the last, People thinks some rich people secretly keep a petroglyph in their mansion’s basement floor. So they have trapdoors and panes of glass to see it on their own.
(Am I right?)
Next questions.
The last sentence is just the author’s imagination.
(Am I right?)
A petroglyph, seemingly a whale, is thirsty with a drought, so it swims out from a recoiling lawn, to escape from thirsty.
(Am I right?)
One more question, in ‘recoiling lawn’, lawn is recoiling or withering because of drought.
(Am I right?)
In ‘as if to wilfully insist on conscience’, the subject of ‘insist on’ is the whale.
(Am I right?)
So the whle probably swims out from under a recoiling lawn, because it both thirsts and tries to wilfully insist on conscience.
(Am I right?)
Last and the hardest, the implicit meaning of ‘insist on conscience’. Since the whale is in a state of imprisonment in a rich person’s basement. It swam out of his state of captivity to appeal to conscience of the rich to have mercy on it and to let it free.
(Am I right?)
Thanks in advance.
Top answer
Stenka25 In the sentence before the last, People thinks some rich people secretly keep a petroglyph in their mansion’s basement floor. ) That's how I read it. ) It is allegorical.
- Stenka25 In the sentence before the last, People thinks some rich people secretly keep a petroglyph in their mansion’s basement floor.
- ) That's how I read it.
- ) It is allegorical.
- ) I don't see why it has to be a whale, except it is "swimming".
- I read it as a fanciful way of saying that a lawn sometimes dies to reveal the rock below with its petroglyphs.
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Stenka25In the sentence before the last, People thinks some rich people secretly keep a petroglyph in their mansion’s basement floor. So they have trapdoors and panes of glass to see it on their own.(Am I right?)
That's how I read it.
Stenka25Next questions.The last sentence is just the author’s imagination.(Am I right?)
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