經典小說:The Great Gatsby(在線閱讀)

美語世界 · 2013-05-22 09:01:09Z

經典小說:The Great Gatsby(在線閱讀)簡介

來源: 美語世界於 2013-05-22 09:01:09 [檔案] [博客] [舊帖] [給我悄悄話] 本文已被閱讀：次 (7258 bytes)

本文內容已被 [ 美語世界 ] 在 2013-05-22 12:55:16 編輯過。如有問題，請報告版主或論壇管理刪除.

感謝非文學青年在美語論壇倡議的讀書活動，
感謝她轉載美國作家F. Scott Fitzgerald這部經典小說。
http://bbs.wenxuecity.com/mysj/159127.html

【讀書俱樂部】The Great Gat*****y by F. Scott Fitzgerald --Chapter 1
來源: 非文學青年於 2012-09-09 15:38:42
http://bbs.wenxuecity.com/mysj/159535.html

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind 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, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to 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 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 unequally at birth.

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 and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gat*****y, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gat*****y, 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 had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability 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 — Gat*****y turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gat*****y, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

The Great Gat*****y (1974) Part 1/14(ZT)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cz1A1muwSE