《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter IX》第21节
I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over. On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
注释摘要
这段文字发生在盖茨比死后，尼克已经准备永远离开东部，回到中西部去。字面上看，他交代了自己在纽约度过周六夜晚的习惯：盖茨比那些夏日派对虽然早已停歇，但在尼克脑海里却挥之不去，音乐与笑声仿佛还隐约从花园里飘来，车道上依然有车来车往。接着他讲到某天夜里真的听到一辆实实在在的车停在盖茨比家门口，但他没有去查看，只是揣测那大概是个远游归来、还不知道派对早已结束的迟暮…