《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter I》第2节
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
注释摘要
尼克在这一段里，做了一个写作者很容易滑倒、但他却处理得极其漂亮的动作：他一边收网，把前面铺开的自己——那个谨慎、克制、来自中西部殷实家庭的叙述者——做了一次总结；一边又撕开一道口子，让读者看到这本书的情感核心其实建立在一个巨大的矛盾之上。 上一句他还在说“保留判断是一种关乎无限希望的事”，这一句紧跟着就承认“这种容忍是有限度的”。这是尼克对自己非常诚实的剖…