The Dawning of Awareness: Oh's, Ah's, Yum's and Hmm's

Hello Class,

I just finished watching "Groundhog Day" for the first time in several years and I think that there is a gap in our current understanding, or attempted understanding, of the nature of an epiphany in the movie and in some of the text's that we read.

One student posted that we should reserve spot for Yum on the list of epiphanies. Well I think that this is a great idea and I that we should add hmm's to the list as well, which I call the dawning of awareness. In "The Dead" we see an hmm moment when he first realized that something was wrong with his wife in regards to the song that was sung and her reaction to it. An hmm moment is not the revelation of important information or sudden clarity - it is the moment that turns on the light in one's brain that there is either an oh or an ah moment on the way. So it is not a true epiphantic moment in the sense of this class but it is close.

An example of an hmm moment in Groundhog Day is when Bill Murray's character Phil sees an old homeless man struggling in a dark alley way. This old man was passed by without so much as an afterthought throughout much of the movie. When Phil saw that he was struggling to get by an hmm moment was triggered and shortly afterwards in the hospital when he learned that he died of old age an oh moment happened.

In The Wind in the Willows a similar hmm moment happened just before the ah moment. Mole and Rat were traveling to find Portly when they heard blissful music. This music was the hmm before the ah.

From these examples I feel that there is a moment not of clarity, like an epiphany, but of awareness before each epiphany - the ah's and the oh's. I think that this type of awareness, that something is not quite right whether good or bad, is present before most epiphanies if not all of them. Therefore, I will be looking for these hmm moments very carefully from now on.