錄音：The Great Gatsby(continued)

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All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school 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, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten 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 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, an original settler. He had casually conferred on 賦予 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 信念 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 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 and Morgan and Maecenas 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.”— 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警句— 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 into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals 橢圓形— like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end — but their physical resemblance相似性must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity異樣 in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the — well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister險惡contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal碩大無朋affair by any standard — it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gat*****y’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gat*****y, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an醜陋eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires — all for eighty dollars a month.

 

所有跟帖： 

• 抱歉如果您發覺我聲音無力那是因為我忘記吃午飯了，送一首歌給我所有粉絲， -sportwoman- ♀ (137 bytes) () 09/07/2012 postreply 11:44:09

• oops! 是送給我的偶像們。餓得累得眼花了。 -sportwoman- ♀ (0 bytes) () 09/07/2012 postreply 11:49:57

• 哈哈哈。。。笑個跟頭。MM後來吃飽了嗎？ -doyouknowme- ♀ (0 bytes) () 09/07/2012 postreply 13:43:36

• Thanks for asking! I did :) -sportwoman- ♀ (0 bytes) () 09/07/2012 postreply 14:04:34

• 大俠多多指正，最近跟大隊精讀 :D -sportwoman- ♀ (0 bytes) () 09/07/2012 postreply 14:53:41

• 讀得超讚！忘記吃午飯又是為啥呢？ -bingli- ♂ (0 bytes) () 09/08/2012 postreply 06:31:08