"He who saves his life will lose it; he who loses his life will be saved."
An interesting rebuttal to Gloria Steinem's fears that when confronted with the me-first morality of box-office darling The Hours:
[V]iewers, especially those who can't empathize with the self-erasure that goes along with living a derived life, may demonize Laura for leaving her family to save her life.
Rod Dreher of National Review offers a spectacularly even-handed condemnation of the movie, following the lives of three women intellectuals who simply can't let the trappings of others stand in the way of their personal growth:
It's superficial to think that happiness comes easy; some people have everything, and yet are still estranged from themselves. It's even more superficial, though, to think the point of life is to find personal happiness. Most people outgrow that egotistical worldview after their teenage years, and come to understand that the task is to live a meaningful life, if not a happy one. A meaningful life is to be found in love, in living nobly and selflessly in the service of something or someone greater than oneself: God, family, friends, country, humanity, or some combination thereof. The secret to happiness is paradoxical: You find it most truly and deeply through loving others more than you love yourself. Only a father can know how joyful it feels to cradle his crying newborn at three in the morning. Only a saint or a hero knows the joy of dying so that others might live.
That last sentence carries great weight for me, having recently watched the first and second episodes of Band of Brothers, and therefore witness to a frightful recreation of the cacaphonous spectacle of men in war, fighting and dying to no rhyme or reason but the collected wit of goodness immersed, for the benefit of mankind, in the depths of hell.
I suppose It's a Wonderful Life never sinks in for some of us.