15/11/20 11:43:28.61 VCV17z5K.net
>>320 の続き 【"The Great Gatsby," Chapter 1】
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 for ever; 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 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 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 - Gatsby turned out all right at the end;
it is what preyed on Gatsby, 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.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby," Everyman's Library, pp.3-4)