《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter I》第5节
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
注释摘要
这一段是尼克初到东部、刚搬进西卵之后的一段内心独白，充满了对自我重塑的渴望，同时也暗藏着一种不易察觉的自嘲。字面上，他从读书这个最平常的举动说起。他说，别的不论，光是“那么多可供阅读的东西”就让人充实，还有从那“年轻的、赋人呼吸的空气”里可汲取的“满满的健康”。他买了十几本关于银行、信贷和投资证券的书，这些书立在他书架上，红皮烫金的装帧就像铸币厂出来的新钞…