了不起的盖茨比 The Great Gatsby.doc

PAGE 15 The Great Gatsby Chapter 1 Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you! --THOMAS PARKE DINVILLIERS Chapter 1 In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that Ive 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 havent had the advantages that youve had. He didnt say any more but weve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence Im 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 grieves 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 parceled 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 dont care what its 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 att