《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter VI》第3节
An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran College of St. Olaf’s in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore. Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. The none too savoury ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common property of the turgid journalism in 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny in Little Girl Bay.
注释摘要
尼克在此处追溯的是盖茨比人生中一个关键的转折期。他先是凭着对未来的模糊直觉，进入了明尼苏达州南部的一所小型路德宗学府——圣奥拉夫学院。但他只待了两周。措辞耐人寻味：学校对他怀有一种“ferocious indifference”，对他的“宿命之鼓”毫不在意，甚至对宿命本身也无动于衷。这里的拟人手法把学院写成了一头冷漠的巨兽，而“drums of his d…