'Gatsby' house to be razed

Too bad I don't have $30 million lying around.

Read today here that Land's End, the Long Island mansion rumored to have inspired Daisy Buchanan's estate in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," is scheduled to be razed.

When I heard the news, I immediately thought of that big house in the 1974 film. But it was actually a set at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England. Scenes at Gatsby's cinematic home, by the way, were shot at the Rosecliff and Marble House mansions in Newport, R.I.

I am an unapologetic fan of the 1974 film. It goes without saying that I love the novel.

I still think about that blinking green light on occasion. It stirs memories from long ago that are best left behind.



How would Fitzgerald put it?

"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Borne back into the past

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby."

Sometimes it is an escape.

I love history. Hell, I should love it, since I majored in it during college and spend a good portion of my working life writing about it.

But it's more than a vocation. It's very much an avocation. It's a passion.

A few weeks ago, while checking out at a store, I noticed the clerk had been reading David McCullough's biography on John Adams. So, we struck up a conversation. And I realized, while talking about our nation's founders, that part of the appeal lies in the fact that so many of these great characters from history are exactly that -- characters.

No novelist, not even Shakespeare, could dream up the rise and fall of Richard Nixon. Horatio Alger has nothing on Harry Truman's ascent to the White House. Even Dickens couldn't come up with as colorful a character as Teddy Roosevelt.

The American Civil War? My goodness, what to say about that? And we haven't even mentioned European or Asian history yet.

For me, though, I think history is also an escape. To what I'm not exactly sure. I think it gives me an illusion that things were better once, more romantic, more noble. I sometimes get depressed because I look at our current era and its great challenges and fail to see the hero on the horizon who's going to help us fix the mess.

And so, like Fitzgerald's boat against the current, I escape back to the past, back to something I've never known, back to a time of great ideas, back to the interesting, flawed men and women who shaped the American experience.

I like what I find there. But, does it make me crazy if I tell you that sometimes I don't want to return to the present?

Boats against the current...

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. ... And one fine morning -- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby."

That quote is among my favorite passages in any work of literature. It could have been ripped from my soul, a somewhat embarrassing realization that I have more in common with Jay Gatsby than I'd prefer to admit.

Didn't make it to Barley's last night. So after eating dinner with friends and visiting my parents awhile, I went home, eased into some comfy clothes and put on Tony Bennett.

I'd heard part of this album, "The Art of Excellence," referenced on The Sunday Show, and downloaded it from iTunes. It was the perfect companion for what became a foggy evening.

It really was worthwhile to live/When love was all we had...

I feel sometimes, if I can be blunt with you, like I, too, am a boat against the current, drifting along here in this strange place called 2007. Like Patton, who so hated the 20th century, I wonder if I really belong "back there" somewhere, seduced by a blinking green hued promise of a yesterday that never was, and a tomorrow that never will be.

This 1986 Bennett album was his "comeback," the first pebble (or should I say gem?) that touched off the second act of his career, leading up to his triumphant appearance on MTV's "Unplugged" in 1994. It reminds me of how good popular music once was -- and could be again. I think about Harry Connick Jr., Norah Jones, Michael Buble and a few others and dare to believe that hope floats out there amid all this noise.

I can't help but wonder how I arrived at this point, crowdin' 30 and feeling restless, wondering where in the hell the world went to that I always figured would be waiting here, and not much liking the harsh reality.

So I feel nostalgia's sweet tug and am a boat against the current, Jimmy Buffett's pirate who had so much trouble with his 40th year, born too late.

And I lose myself in that long-ago music, caught up in all those hooks and 4/4 mirages, hoping for reasons I still don't quite understand that some way, somehow, just like before, it's yesterday once more.