chapter 1

Summary:

从一贫如洗的穷光蛋到纸醉金迷的大富翁，从因贫穷而错失的初恋到重逢时无法抵抗的诱惑，了不起的盖茨比，究竟是奢华绚烂的美国梦，还是令人痛惜的美国悲剧？

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind (在脑海中反复思考)ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way (以保守的方式), and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

In consequence (因此), I'm inclined to (倾向于) reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to (对...知情)the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon

—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out (分配)unequally at birth(一出生).

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform(穿上军装) and at a sort of moral attention forever;

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from (排除在外) my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

This responsiveness(敏感性) had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability(感受性) which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"

—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on (掠夺了) Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of (跟随在...之后)his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations.

The Carraways (姓氏,卡尔威) are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from (是...的后裔) the Dukes of Buccleuch(巴克勒公爵,苏格兰贵族), but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled (硬汉派的,面无表情的) painting that hangs in Father's office.

I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration(条顿民族大迁徙) known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid(反突袭) so thoroughly that I came back restless.

Instead of being the warm center of the world, the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business.

Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man.

All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school (预备学校) for me and finally said, "Why—ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces.

Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town (近郊) it sounded like a great idea.

He found the house, a weather-beaten(饱经风吹雨打的) cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone.

I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge(道奇,汽车品牌) and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder(开拓者), an original settler.

He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving (清新怡人的) air.

I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas(迈达斯,希腊神话中的国王) and Morgan(摩根,美国财阀) and Maecenas(梅塞纳斯，古罗马财主) knew.

And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"(《耶鲁新闻》)

—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man."

This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. 

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America.

It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land.

Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out (向外延伸) into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound(长岛海峡).

They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat to the contact end

—but their physical resemblance (相似的外表) must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead.

To the wingless(没有翅膀的,此指人类) a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

（1290 words）

今日短语

1. turn over in one’s mind在某人的脑海中反复思量

2. in consequence因此

3. be inclined to倾向于

4. be privy to对...知情

5. parcel out分配

6. at birth一出生

7. be in uniform穿上军装/制服

8. exempt from从...豁免，排除在...之外

9. prey on sth.掠夺，捕食sth.

10. in the wake of ...在...之后接踵而来

11. be descended from是...的后裔，起源于...

12. confer on sb. sth.授予某人某物

13. jut out向外延伸

14. physical resemblance 相似的外表

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