《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter I》第4节
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. “How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
注释摘要
这一段的叙述语调发生了一个微妙的转折。尼克刚刚交代完自己家族的来历与来东部的决定，接下来该交代他怎么住到西卵去了。他以一个很务实的句子开头——“务实的做法是在城里找公寓”——但立刻就用“温暖的季节”和“刚刚离开一个有着宽阔草坪与友善树木的地方”把务实给冲淡了。这里我们能看出尼克这个人，他嘴上说着要做个务实的证券人，骨子里是很容易被感官与记忆左右的。 那个建…