《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter I》第1节
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
注释摘要
尼克·卡拉威的小说开场白是一段极为精致的自我剖白，他试图在一开头就确立自己作为叙述者的核心品格：我是一个不轻易评判别人的人。他回溯到性格形成的源头，那是他父亲在“我更年轻、更容易受伤的岁月”给他的一句忠告——每当你想批评什么人，要记住，这世上不是所有人都拥有你那样的优越条件。他父亲只说了这么一句，但尼克告诉我们，他们父子之间有一种奇怪而微妙的默契，叫做“在…