Harry Potter: An elegy

[saffronlie]

Harry Potter and I go back some way, as the earlier years of this journal attest. I wasn’t quite in the throes of pubescent adolescence when I discovered the books, as I was when I discovered Hanson, the first of my three great teenage obsessions (Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles being the third, and, perhaps, the most enduring). There was a time

Comments

[ukashi_goshi]

What a beautiful post. Thank you for writing that.

I have a quote for you from Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (wonderful book, btw):

"It was absurd, but underlying his experience of the world, at some deep Precambrian stratum, was the expectation that someday - but when? - he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there - somewhere - waiting for him. He would return to the scenes of his childhood, to the breakfast table of the apartment off the Graben, to the Oriental splendor of the locker room at the Militaer- und Civilschwimmschule; not as a tourist to their ruins, but in fact; not by means of some enchantment, but simply as a matter of course. This conviction was not something rational or even seriously believed, but somehow it was there, like some early, fundamental error in his understanding of geography - that, for instance, Quebec lay to the west of Ontario - which no amount of subsequent correction or experience could ever fully erase."

I think that's me. If I actually stop to think that the past is gone, permanently, it devastates me. Part of the machinery my mind needs to keep going is that kind of illogical, irrational, unconscious assumption.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. (Greek roots: the word for coming home, and the word for pain/grief.) And so is the experience of reading as a child. You're right, there's nothing like it. I had an earth-shattering moment some years ago when I picked up The Voyage of the Dawn Treader after not having looked at it since I was a child. It was always my favorite of the Narnia books, the one that enchanted me completely, and reading it again as an adult brought back all those memories so vividly. Not just the memories, but the feeling of reading that as a child. That's also the reason why I don't want to see the LOTR movies: I'm sure they're very well done, but when I read the books, I still see the images I saw as a child and have those feelings, and I know that the movie images would overtake my mental images very quickly.

The good thing is that passions come and go - and come again. Flat, dull periods are sometimes just fallow time, and then you find all kinds of unexpected richness and strength coming back again.

Just a couple other things -

In the movie, did they do a good job with the scene where Harry finally understands the message on the snitch and says, "I am about to die"? That part in the book killed me, absolutely killed me, OMG so good - did you like how they handled it?

And since you mentioned some...interest in Daniel Radcliffe, have you seen this picture? (Warning: NSFW, though not lurid or anything.) http://static.regretsy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/potteruncut.jpg

[saffronlie]

That's a lovely quote. I think there's something to be said for such a belief, or at least, for a belief in cyclicality. I mean, I'm Catholic, so not really into reincarnation or anything, but Christianity's sense of time is at once linear (Creation ----> Apocalypse) and very very circular, based as it is on the concept of resurrection. Anyway! Yes, the impossibility of return is something we can't ever truly confront as it's too devastating.

I've struggled a bit with nostalgia studies because I want to adhere so fully to the word's roots. If it wasn't home, or wasn't your time, then can you truly feel nostalgic about it? For example, someone who obsesses about the 19th-century and wishes they could live there: are they nostalgic, or something else? Unfortunately I'm not sure there's another word for that something else, so it has to be nostalgia nonetheless.

Oh, Dawn Treader! I watched the movie on a plane trip a few weeks ago and considered writing about it. I loved Narnia also, but I've consistently reread them, the last time being as an undergraduate and so I'm probably overdue for another go. It had been too long for me to remember how accurate the film was to the book (except one scene that I know they did horribly wrong and it didn't work), but the movie really reminded me how fun the book was. It's just such a cracking adventure story! And so consciously medieval, with all the mythical places and races.

HP7: yes, that scene is brilliant. I'd forgotten that Harry's realisation actually comes from Snape's memories in the Pensieve, which is a brilliantly powerful montage, and the movie really hits an emotional high at that point. They did add one thing that I didn't like, but the scene at the edge of the forest where he turns over the stone and the shadows appear is pretty much all that I hoped for. Very well done.

Haha, I have, but thank you! Mmm.