Groundhog Day. Snowing like hell here, and not only didn't our groundhog see his shadow, he couldn't even get out of his burrow. Nor did we get out of ours: Carol and I slept in and spent part of the afternoon watching…Groundhog Day.
I was going to write a longish essay on what may be the finest film of the past fifty years, but I realized that someone else had already written it. Basically, What He Said.
To be human is to learn better, no matter how much it hurts. Some catch on faster than others, and while it's clear that a lot of people die before they learn much of anything at all, I'm not going to be so arrogant as to claim confident knowledge that death is the end of all learning. Maybe we're only beginning. Of course it's better to learn sooner than later—but if the alternative is to keep banging our shins on things without end, I'm guessing that even the worst of us will eventually figure it out.
That's the message of Groundhog Day: You repeat Sixth Grade until you learn the lessons. Then it's on to Seventh Grade. (I'm good with that. You can have Eternal Rest. Give me Eternal Challenge!)
