hard · Act reading

The lighthouse keeper kept meticulous logs, recording wind, tide, and the passage of every vessel in a hand that never wavered. Yet on the pages reserved for personal remarks he wrote nothing at all, leaving a column of blank squares stretching back forty years. Visitors who admired his diligence assumed the empty column signaled a man with little to say. Those who knew him understood it differently: the silence was not absence but a refusal, a deliberate withholding from a record he suspected would one day be read by strangers. The passage most strongly suggests that the keeper left the personal column blank because he:

1. lacked the literacy or training required to compose remarks beyond simple numerical entries.
2. believed his private thoughts would be exposed and chose not to surrender them to a public record.
3. considered the official weather and vessel data far more useful to mariners than any commentary.
4. had simply run out of meaningful events worth noting over his four decades of service.

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