Most years on 2 February, I watch Bill Murray in Ground Hog Day. You know the story: how Phil (Murray) -- a man with an immense cavity where anything resembling a caring human being should be -- cannot move from 2 February to 3 February. He lives a single day over and over in his least favorite town, with each repeated day being perpetually and precisely the same. Broken record.
The real story is not Phil being stuck in Puxatawney, PA, but stuck within a single day as himself.
As with the movie Back to the Future, it's not where he's stuck but when he's stuck -- and in what condition. In Phil's case, he's on a modern "Quest," a Quest to see just what a rotten person he is and to embrace the needed change of character. Never was a man set upon a Quest with such reluctance.
It's not unlike Robinson Crusoe's quest on his little island. Before Crusoe went to sea to make his fortune, his father advised against it and predicted that, should Robin do this thing, he would get two things as a result: "solitude and leisure to repent it." Ol' Robin Crusoe, landing on the island, ends up completely alone and with lots of leisure. (Well, he's alone until...Friday, heh heh.)
So with Phil's Quest in Groundhog Day. He has lots of leisure, and there's that solitude of his situation: unlike everyone around him, he alone is re-living the same day. His real Quest? He must search for himself, look into the abysmal person that he has been, see how he has failed at life and relationships, and then become a person -- and make some reparation.
That is, he has leisure to repent his previous choices and time to grow into an actual human being. A lot about becoming a human being involves just finding something useful to do each day. And that's Phil's mission, his quest, should he decide to accept it. If he doesn't, he will never get past 2 February -- at least in terms of his character.
Quest Stories
These date from millennia ago and have standard features we have learned to expect in them. And more: Quests have changed from what they once were.
Take The Odyssey: there's an old epic with the standard epic formula — an epic hero who is on a Quest. Odysseus' 10-year journey to get home from the Trojan War delivers a wild ride: he pokes a Cyclops in the eye. He has an affair with a nymph. The nymph, by the way, turns all of Odysseus' men into pigs (and all the women ask, "How could you tell?!") And he hears the Sirens sing their alluringly fatal song -- the only human to have done so and survived it. And he scarcely escapes Charybdis and Scylla -- some sorts of sea monsters that devour most of his men and some of the boats. Would we ever be the same after facing these phenomena?
Quest tales change along the millennia to focus not on the external but on the internal life of the hero. Take Gatsby: his Quest is to retrieve Daisy, the love of his life -- but not Daisy of the present. He seeks the Daisy he had known in 1917 when they first met and fell in love. Gatsby's quest is an internal dream to stop time, to go back to the way they were, and to begin again. As Nick, the narrator, tells Gatsby, "you can't stop time, you know": Daisy has married, had a child, and lived life into the 1920s; time didn't stop while Gatsby was busy building the fortune that alone would attract and hold onto Daisy.
Ironically, in Groundhog Day Phil gets what Gatsby can't: time past. Phil gets the same day repeatedly. For Gatsby, not one single second will be repeated -- even though, ironically, his past with Daisy is always present in his mind. Of course, after Daisy returns to her husband Tom, Gatsby must confront reality: you can't get the past back; Daisy is not the same. And we see that Gatsby has lived with that one Dream, a dream which obscured his life, his vision, and his character. He has established an external and ill-obtained wealth, but his interior life had devolved into a sham like his palace -- a facade devoid of anything veritable. It's a great Dream, but as in a dream, it all comes to nothing. It all vanishes when we awake. In the end, we get a sense that Gatsby has been having a very deep look at himself -- he wakes and understands, however briefly, and -- there, at that point, began a change. That is the ἀναγνώρισις (anagnorisis): the moment of awareness of the true situation. No spoiler here....
So what does Phil do with his time upon time? He does every single thing that numerous humans do every day to avoid realities about themselves. He gets drunk with some new buddies. He carouses, drives a car over a mailbox and down some railroad tracks while fleeing police, and gets thrown in jail. He manipulates at least two young women to get them into bed and attempts to get the object of his affections into that cheap bed as well. He robs an armored car, buys an expensive and luxurious sedan, gets a new girl on his arm, and goes to a Western movie dressed as one of Clint Eastwood's Old-West Equalizers. What's T. S. Eliot's line? "Distracted from distraction by distraction." Phil is. And none of it works: he can't manipulate himself out of 2 February.
Tiring of the avoidance, he kills himself -- repeatedly, to no avail. As suicide does, it accomplishes nothing except to give others pain (but there's not all that much pain in others regarding Phil's death...). He even attempts to kill himself with the groundhog, but the groundhog is not the key: Phil is the key. Nothing else will work because he will not face the person he has been and is, nor make reparation.
So each day Phil re-awakes at 6:00 a.m. on 2 February to the radio alarm clock playing Sonny and Cher and inane chatter from the DJs. There are no consequences from whatever Phil has done the "previous" day. But he doesn't do anything to change himself into a viable human being instead of the narcissistic vacuum he is. He is stuck in a hell of his own making. His Quest hasn't begun because he's avoiding it. As he gets sick of himself in the day-after-day sameness, he remarks, not on Groundhog Day but on his own inner being, "It's gonna be cold. It's gonna be gray. And it's gonna last you for the rest of your life."
There's another very interesting Quest in Star Wars: Luke visits Yoda for "Jedi training" -- lessons about himself which (like Phil stuck in his 2 Feb.) he does everything to avoid. To start right, Luke must enter the Dagobah cave.
And just so Phil, seeing what a horrible creature he is day after day, starts to come out of his hole, like the groundhog, and sees just how much of his cold nature is left. Will he remain a perpetual winter or will he grow into a spring?
Of course. Right. We all live in a Groundhog Day. We, in fact, do get our days over and over, and do so in order to look at ourselves -- not, that is, as in a selfie, emptily external and narcissistic -- but to see into ourselves and decide to grow into a being somewhat worthy of the life we have. If you're not looking into what can be an abyss of former days now and then to see what kind of being you've been...well, your Quest awaits. It's hard to face, sometimes terrible, to understand who we've been at given moments and what that has meant for others. But if you've not faced that image, there's no escaping that day, and you may be doomed to repeat it over and over.
And...it's true: we waste time, avoid, distract ourselves and others, excuse ourselves, and will not look for the shadow we might have cast on someone else's life. But perhaps...there's the day we'll learn a musical instrument. Learn French, or at least read some kind of literature -- not so we can schmooze and manipulate someone but read it for what it teaches us about life and love, see what another person has seen as they passed through their days. Perhaps we'll learn to listen, learn to help, learn to live, and learn to love others while we learn to love ourselves out of a perpetual sameness of a day without BE-ing [Link]. We need those moments of ἀναγνώρισις -- awareness of what is really going on.
The ideal? The quest starts by learning to know and love Him who alone can re-make our being. After all, one has the distinct sense in watching Groundhog Day that Someone is definitely in control of whether or not he gets out of 2 February. In the movie that Being is hidden, but we might glimpse him incarnate in the movie's bartender, who smiles but shakes his head as he looks past the facades of the main characters, straight into their interior lives.
If you're like me, you may have to face a much longer time in Groundhog Day than other people do.
And visits to the cave: it may be in the wee hours of a thousand different nights -- parades of ghosts. And then, not in the night but in another moment during a long commute, looking at yourself in a moment of a day long past, or on this or another day, and seeing not merely your motives but the consequences of your actions for others -- pondering connections lost, people you'll never see again, conversations you will never have, and that you're left carrying the things you needed to say.
Or it may occur over a book -- a sentence, a phrase -- and you find yourself alone in the cave, understanding clearly, for the first time, something you did long ago: what it meant for someone else and what it meant along eternal lines. 'Aναγνώρισις. It all involves leisure and solitary moments, as on Crusoe's island. And as with Skywalker, no one can go with you into your cave.
Some time there will be a literal visit: a return to actual places where we must re-visit what we once were at one time or another -- after all, part of a Quest is the journey, literal as well as metaphorical.
[Edit: 22 March -- over a month after writing this blog entry:
A literal visit? Here's an ironic example: just yesterday, I was on a spur-of-the moment side-trip in Colorado. I ended up (silently but unwillingly -- others in the car wanted to go) on a detour from our intended destination -- to a place where, completely unknown to the driver or others in the car, very important events had occurred in my life 40 years before. I had not been to that place again since that time.
So there I was: a parking lot and amphitheater, face-to-face with ghosts of people who were vitally important to me...and facing as well the ghost of my former self -- re-viewing decisions made, things done, consequent conversations, and events changing time and relationships. Most important were those long-ago words, both spoken and left unspoken, that opened paths for people to carry on happily with their lives -- which is a gift everyone needs. The significance of these moments...? They were ponderously heavy 40 years back, are so today, and certainly are so eternally.
Was this trip unplanned? Well, there's a question! This visit was too ironic to be "unplanned" -- at least by me. The driver had no idea of my life events unfolding in that place 40 years previously. Looks like it wasn't a detour at all but the intended destination for me that day -- a destination Someone else seems to have planned. The others toured an amphitheater; I toured a cave...and had to face myself...again.
End of edit.]
While the most valuable moments of clear vision are made in solitude, there comes a time to talk with another person, restitution to make, if possible -- at the very least to offer, to let them know that you know.... In my experience, there have been people to talk with -- and it's always best to talk to people who will not judge but can receive you honestly, openly, not dismissing your responsibility, but listening without judgement [Link].
Some other people, shining their halos and looking benevolent, will judge you severely and, smiling, will not really forgive you (although they might say they do). That'll hold consequences for them...; still, they are allowed: you are the one who has erred, has caused pain. Yet they are wrong to kick you when you are making an effort to own it all; they are cruel to heap more judgement on your back. But you can't talk to them: they can't hear you.
You know what a martyr is? It's a person who seeks forgiveness from someone who thinks they're a saint.
And yet others: some people I wish I could speak to...but I cannot -- I don't know where they are, and perhaps they are at a peace which I would not disturb. This I cannot know, and so I leave a door open for them -- which is all one can do sometimes.
That's the way it is on the Quest.
What's Phil's line when he finally gets to 3 February, the end of his Quest? "This has been the end of a very long day...."
The purposes of Groundhog Day, of visits to the cave, are not to make us dwell in the past. That was Gatsby's mistake. No: it is instead to enable us to see who we are to be in the present. It is solely preparation to move ahead in the right direction. That is all-important. We can't move ahead if we don't examine what we've been, who we need to become, and what reparation we might make.
Phil arrives at 3 February only when he is fit to move ahead. And I think we can only move ahead (I mean internally, that is -- not repeat the same mistakes) when we've clearly seen and owned what we need to see. And then the past can be left behind.
Even then, sometimes someone you harmed in the past will attempt to hinder you: will claim you are "forgiven," but will never allow that you're no longer the person who did this or that thing.... They may even prop up a picture before others that is a snapshot in time -- one sole image of what you were (and were so perhaps for repeated days), but not what you are today. And then others will judge you by that false picture -- a picture produced out of self-righteousness but, still, from a petty vengeance. They've been hurt. They cannot move on....
Still, the picture they paint of you is not the reality; you will move ahead regardless. And even that move is not entirely up to you, just as it wasn't completely up to Phil when he would be allowed to move on. There's that greater Someone who.... How does Hamlet put it?
...our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will -- (V.ii.9-11)
What about the wrongs that Phil has done? It is precisely, in Phil's case, what Backman observed:
The only ones who will not allow you to move on, who would perpetually remember and display only your misdeeds in life, not the changes for the better, are those who would always hold them against you -- yet these same would want you to forget their misdeeds without mention. You may forget them. These people are never, in that condition, worth your attention.
And when you move on? You are fit to meet all the wonderful gifts in the days ahead, and that is nothing but a gift in itself, the highest Joy. Phil is happy at the end of Groundhog Day not because he gets the girl. He is happy precisely because he now has the capacity to welcome real happiness -- and has become a being who can enjoy and add to others' happiness as well as to his own -- and not ruin it.
So. Shall we get on with our Quest?
