The Moonlight Traveler by Philip van Doren Stern

George’s unsatisfying life is comprehensible. Friends who return part of the received are a great gift, as much to make all the failing doubts evanesce, but seeing the world which we have contribute to build of is still more significant and gratifying. When a fellow understands to be fundamental and indispensable in the universe economy, then he must absolutely abandon the unsuitability sense which pervades him. George Bailey has not been a failure, not only because he has friends –as at the end he was suggested by his angel- but above all because he made all, for the family and the community. Everybody, alone and together with others, with own talents and will. No one else will be ever able to make again the same actions, to give again the same course to the existence. Every living who tramples the earth soil contributes to build the future and his part gets inevitably intersected with the others one. In it the fundamental concept that we are all part of a becoming is expressed, more than the static dowels of a mosaic, more than the single pebbles of the sand wet by the sea waves.

Apart from the fact this aphorism comes to light with the sixty-eight anthropologists and so at Philip Van Doren Stern of the directors Frank Capra’s times it had been never pronounced, the argument is more than ever actual. In a tell, in the plot of a sentimental tell, the way to say “all are useful, no one is essential” gets consumed and evanishes. Only then George, between choosing this second option and the risk to pay the failure consequences, implores to have his life back, because only in that instant he understands that anyone has a role on the earth, irreplaceable and unrepeatable. So then his guardian angel Clarence is sent to him for being his mentor showing the world without that his presence could have influenced it. After having realized to have amassed a quantity of disgraces, the risk to see a life job failing induces him to desire to disappear, not ever being born. George Bailey is not narrow-minded and greedy, he is only an exhausted man, at 38 tired for having got measured since the birth against the events of a miserable and unworthy life.

Sure, “A Christmas carol” by Charles Dickens had already made school and Ebenezer Scrooge’s story who during Christmas received as a gift the possibility to see the past again and discover the future, in the following hundred years was amply re-utilized by other writings, but “The Christmas gift” unites to this plot a more savory ingredient: life without the protagonist. And as always, who doesn’t publish writes the major value tests. It was a fluke for Van Doren Stern that the director came into possession of his little volume for free donated for Christmas to the acquaintances, because, on the wake of many good writers, no one appreciated much the value of the writing to publish it.

The Moonlight Traveler by Philip van Doren Stern