A few notes about Harry Potter.
There are far bigger Harry Potter fans in the world, and ones that are far less of fans than myself. I don’t regard myself in the category of Harry Potter nerds, for it is not fair to those that actually are. I do, however, hold the books and films in high esteem and would like to offer a brief reflection on them now:
Although tonight is not the end of the series, technically, it might as well be. When each movie comes out, my friend Allison tends to look desperately into our eyes and say, “Guys, this is the end. This is the end of our childhood.” She’ll repeat this a few times; she’ll say it a few more tonight. She’ll say it when the final movie comes out and then after that when we graduate college and get jobs and have kids.
I don’t see Harry Potter as a sign of childhood - to do so would not do the series justice. For me, it never made me feel like a child; it still doesn’t. It makes me feel incredibly mature - or perhaps nothing at all; it transcends age. But now I am speaking in code and I should give a brief history of my time spent within this mythology.
My mother likes to tell the story of our school book fair, in which she openly gave away the last copy of the first book that she’d been keeping for herself to a pair of middle schoolers begging for the book. She’d given it, saying that she’d pick it up later at Barnes and Noble to read it to me. She’ll tell this story whenever someone brings up the series; it’s her mantra when it comes to Harry Potter, much like Allison’s in a mention of childhood. My mother read all the books to me until the final one - and if memory serves correctly, that means she was reading the sixth one to me while I was in junior high. All of this is incredibly embarrassing, and it probably broke her heart when, for the final book, I told her I wanted to read it alone. This was mostly likely because, during the sixth book, she’d cried heavily on the front porch when Dumbledore died, while rain poured down around us. She could barely read it aloud she was crying so hard.
I hadn’t been an avid reader until the fourth one, probably, when we’d started to send my father to the midnight release parties to get the book for us the next morning. I awoke the next day and found it lying placidly next to my bed; then my mother and I would start reading. We stopped halfway through the sixth one, citing it as too long, but then picked it up again to read before the sixth one came out and it was around then that things formed into hysteria.
I never liked the movies; I saw the first one twice in its first two days, and went to the bathroom twice each time. I thought it was incredibly hackneyed and took away from the majesty; it made the thing seem trivial and childish and unimportant. The acting was poor, the music was bad, and the imagery threw me off. I thought this of the second one too, and it wasn’t until the third when things started to pick up and I got on board. But still, the movies don’t captivate me nearly as much as the books, which is probably true for most fans.
I went to the get the book at midnight for the final year, with my friend Eli, while my father and his girlfriend waited in the outrageous line all night. It was the summer of 2007 and I can remember it vividly. We made fun of the activities, we scoured for kids in costumes, we ran around the mall hastily looking for coffee for my father. We got the books and went home; Eli went to sleep, but I stayed up reading. I read from midnight that night until eleven thirty the next night and finished it. My one true fear was that on the way out of the store, someone would shout out the ending and ruin it.
I’m still not exactly clear on what happens at the end of the book, because each time I’ve read it, I’ve gone sprawling into the end uncontrollably. The day I spent reading the seventh book, I was miserable - I was tired and cranky and hungry and I wanted to sleep, but I wanted to read. But everything about the book was so vivid; each event plastered with a song I’d put on while it was happening: “Wingbone” by Chad VanGaalen for the opening, followed by “Neverevereverdid” by Architecture in Helsinki; “Go By” by Elliot Smith for the epic broom battle in the sky; “After The Call” by Electrelane and “It’s All Gonna Break” by Broken Social Scene for the end. It was all so intrinsic and amazing that when it was over, it never really seemed to end.
It’s difficult to say what Harry Potter did for me, or the world for that matter. Some say it was a time to return to childhood and slip into an imaginary world, but for me it was never really about that. It was about escape and magic. It was about slipping away not to something, but from something, and that was my life. I wanted desperately to go to Hogwarts; I still do. There was a girl I knew in grade school who wanted to badly to go that she stopped going to school, stopped leaving her house, and simply sat in rereading the books. ”All she wants is to be a wizard,” her mother would say. This was in eighth grade.
I didn’t blame her. There was something about real life that was so unappealing and so appalling and it was no wonder that people would want to disappear from it. Everyday there is trauma, but it’s not the trauma that takes place in the magical world, but it’s the everyday trauma that’s far worse. Perhaps the world isn’t going to end and there’s no true evil, but it’s about as bad as it can get. You watch people around you die and move away and leave you; you watch people yell at you and tell you they don’t love you; you watch the people you care about be bad people. You fuck up and then have to deal with it, without powers, but simply with the awkwardness of human life. And the only real time when none of this is going on, apart from reading the books, is when you’re dreaming.
This is a very pessimistic way of looking at the world, and I don’t mean it to be. The fact is, what’s so appealing about Harry Potter isn’t the actual book, but simply the way it’s so different from our real lives. It’s what we all want to be, even though the story itself has been told before. The characters are no different from other books, and the plot is no different from anything else - in fact, some would argue it’s based on the Bible. But it’s that it’s all right there for you, and you can let it surround you until you really feel like it’s there.
I don’t agree with Allison that this is the end. It doesn’t matter to me how many articles about the parties there are; how many pictures of little kids in costumes or parodies made of it - Harry Potter was always about me. It did what other books couldn’t: it took us somewhere that wasn’t here. And maybe that’s why I simply can’t understand the ending, because once I do there’s a good chance it actually will be over.
I’ll go the movie at midnight tonight, and I’ll enjoy it. It’ll come out on DVD and we’ll watch it and it will show up on ABC Family. The books will sit on my shelf and collect dust and maybe I’ll read them again. I’ll grow up, my kids will read them, and they’ll probably remake the movies. The websites will keep going and the podcasts will keep going and the clubs will keep going. But to me, the only real thing that will keep going will be the way the books made me feel, and how much happiness they gave me, and continue to give me.
That was a very nerdy post.
