It is a wonderful life

I forgot, when I mentioned my liking the old Hollywood movies, to name the one most pertinent these days:

It's a wonderful life.

If someone of you has never seen it, should go and buy or rent the DVD to watch it. It is a rare statement on the beauty of life.

Just in case, I summarize the plot.

It starts with a dialogue, high in the sky, between two stars: it is S. Peter telling S. Joseph to send someone to save a man in danger. Here starts the story.

A young man, anywhere in Middle America before WWII, dreams of travelling the world, but, for one reason or another, he never succeeds in doing it. It always happens something keeping him from it. Most of all, his father dies, and he has to stay to run his Savings and Loan firm, which otherwise would have been closed. And so on and so forth. At a certain point, though, something happens that puts the Savings and Loans to which he dedicated his life in sure danger, and he feels desperate. He wants to drown himself in the river, but is saved by a funny little man, who feigns drowning to get his help. But the good deed doesn't help him out of his black mood.

"Better were not to have been born!"

These are (more or less) the words of despair, echoing Job.

Well, tells him the funny little man (actually an angel sent by S. Joseph), if that is what you want, it will be granted to you.

So he is given the chance to see the world as it would have been had he not been born. All the good he had done, would not have been there. I won't stay to tell which.

Rarely I have seen an equally powerful statement on the meaning of life: the more worthy, the more one has given.

It's all about gift-giving. And Christmas.

The whole drama of despair and salvation takes place at Christmas. When it is time of giving thanks. So the movie ends with everybody chipping in to help out of troubles one who so much had helped others.

HP