《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter VI》第17节
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.” He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was … … One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
注释摘要
他疯狂地向四周张望，好像过去就潜伏在这房子的阴影里，就在他的手差一点够到的地方。这个动作写得极好，"wildly"一词透露出一种近乎失控的急迫，而"lurking"把"过去"比喻成一个活物，一个躲藏在暗处的存在，仿佛它是有意志的，故意让他抓不住。他说要把一切都修复成原来的样子，用的是"fix everything just the way it was b…