Repetitions, Redundancies, and Reverberations

Today as I sat and listened to Dr. Sexson talk about the movie Groundhog Day, regrettably I have never seen this piece, I thought to myself how many years, months, days, would I take to learn the lesson that “one’s life is hardly every lived for oneself but for others…” as Mircea Eliade puts it in The Myth of the Eternal Return. Truthfully, I think it would take me quite a while to come to this conclusion and inevitably I would learn many things along the way.

I think the beginning of the repetitious day would consist of me acting in line with Hermes, mischievous. A world without consequences would be a tempting thing and Zeus knows I, and many other girls I know, would kill to eat whatever they’d like with no worry that it would go “straight to the thighs”. I wonder if in a moral sense I wouldn’t be able to rob a bank. I’d like to think I’m more upstanding than that but again, I think I would succumb to the temptation just to say I could.

Yet, even though all those things sound like they would be an interesting adventure the thought of repeating the same thing over and over again completely petrifies me. But why should it, again according to Eliade we should strive for this repetition. There is nothing in our lives but repetition we just do not have the time to stop and acknowledge it. Furthermore, Eliade goes on to say, “In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.” Personally I think I’d like to try out imitating Athena for awhile.