《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter VIII》第1节
I couldn’t sleep all night; a foghorn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive, and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning would be too late. Crossing his lawn, I saw that his front door was still open and he was leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep. “Nothing happened,” he said wanly. “I waited, and about four o’clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out the light.” His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness.
注释摘要
这段文字从尼克的一夜无眠开始。雾号在长岛海湾上不断呻吟，那个"groaning"用得极重，不像是船只在鸣笛，倒像是这整件事——车祸、死亡、谎言——从水面传来的持续低吼。尼克在"grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams"之间辗转反侧，这句话点明了他此刻的状态：现实已经怪异到和噩梦难以区分的地步。他半病半…