As the much awaited film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby nears its release, a good deal is being written about it and Fitzgerald.  In particular, much effort is being spent connecting the ethos Fitzgerald was portraying in The Great Gatsby to the present day.
     When I think of Fitzgerald, I think also of Ernest Hemmingway, that other memorable chronicler of American emptiness and ennui who, like Fitzgerald, died far too young (although he lived over fifteen years longer than Fitzgerald).  A visit to Hemmingway's grave in Ketchum, Idaho, finds one looking at a fascinating assortment of bottles of various alcoholic beverages and coins of varying denominations, all stacked or strewn across the tombstone set toward the rear of the grassy expanses of the cemetery.  Both Fitzgerald and Hemmingway lived passionately, lived to live for the moment, for the present experience, believing that it, and only it, is the measure of what is true.  So did Fitzgerald close out The Gatsby, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
     Whatever else we may think about Fitzgerald or Hemmingway's viewpoints on life, we cannot deny that Fitzgerald hit the hammer on the nail with these words.  If we do not move on, if we do not constantly strive to break through to the new, the next moment, we become, yes, victims of the past, the past that will never end, precisely because we never allow it to begin.
     It is today, it is now, it is the present moment that is the ground of everything else we know and do.  Don't overlook it, for it is the heart of all truth, the felt presence of God.