In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning
2 over in my mind ever since.
3 "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the
4 people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
5 He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved
6 way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined
7 to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made
8 me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself
9 to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was
10 unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown
11 men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation,
12 or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was
13 quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in
14 which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
15 Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I
16 forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the
17 fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
18 And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.
19 Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't
20 care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the
21 world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous
22 excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his
23 name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for
24 which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,
25 then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of
26 life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
27 thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability
28 which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"— it was an extraordinary gift
29 for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is
30 not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on
31 Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest
32 in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. Which of the following words is the best replacement for "marred" in the
fourth sentence of the third paragraph?
A. Aided
B. Stirred
C. Distorted
D. Imitated
O E. Stolen