《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter IX》第17节
Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home. There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and around what had happened to us together, and what had happened afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still, listening, in a big chair.
注释摘要
尼克在这里开始了一场漫长而心碎的告别。他告诉我们，即使是在他最为东方所激动的时刻——即使他清楚地感觉到长岛和纽约的世界比俄亥俄河以西那些沉闷、臃肿、不断窥探私生活的中西部城镇要优越得多——他在东方感受到的，始终是一种扭曲。这里他提及中西部的“无休止的审问”，顺带勾勒出美国小镇社会的窒息感：那种只放过孩子和老人、对成年人永远充满道德监视的氛围。这种对比，让读…