Thoughts on a Re-Read; or, Potter Before Potter

I am re-reading the Harry Potter series.  I finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone this afternoon.  Reading it again after all this time felt odd-- it has probably been a good decade since the last time I read it, certainly before the publication of Deathly Hallows.  In a way, re-reading the book felt like reminiscing with old friends about long ago: "Remember the Sorting and your first night at Hogwarts?" "Remember when you thought you'd be expelled but ended up as the Seeker on the Quidditch team?"  But that same nostalgia also gives some pain.  Characters that meant little to me at the time are suddenly fleshed out in my mind with all that I've read since.  I noticed that Lavender Brown got sorted into Gryffindor.  Fred and George are still complete and happy.  Scabbers, still only a rat.  Mostly, Neville: just a meek, nice boy with a toad and a propensity to get picked on, his backstory totally unknown. 

I first read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone when I was eleven years old.  I read it before Harry Potter was *Harry Potter.*  I read it before most of my friends, even.  There were no films, or-- to my knowledge-- even talk of films.  The whole world that Rowling so clearly and carefully built I imagined without the aid of set and costume designers, or actors.  In my mind, Hermione had darker brown hair, like me (of course).  Minerva McGonagall was younger than Dame Maggie Smith, and a bit harsher looking with black hair.  Dumbledore was slightly madder.  Upon a re-read, I notice that the whole book has a whimsical Roald Dahl-esqueness to it that the movies don't quite capture.  And, as an adult, I also notice how wonderfully Rowling controls the prose and plot.  Her world-building is astounding in a way that I could not recognize as a child.  Moreover, the depth of it becomes apparent with the totality of the series, which I did not have when first I read this book.  I remember waiting for Book 3.

Then there's the fact that I've grown up.  I think I cry more easily now.  When I was little, my mom would always read The Polar Express to me on Christmas Eve, and she would always cry at the end when the protagonist says that his sister can no longer hear the bell, but that it rings for him as it does for all true believers.  When I was small, I poked fun at her.  Then, a Christmas came a few years ago when I started crying, too.  I think Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has undergone a similar transformation for me.  I teared up when Hagrid and Harry entered Diagon Alley (it was so magical!).  I felt myself crumbling a bit when Dumbledore spoke to Harry in the infirmary about love, and when Hagrid gave Harry a scrapbook of pictures of his parents.  I almost full-on cried when Dumbledore gave Neville ten points, because I just knew how much it meant to Neville. 

I've gained so much in the last decade of my life.  Still, a distinct sense of something lost accompanied my re-read.  The closest I can come to describing it is this: I will never again wonder at the cat that reads the street sign on Privet Drive.  I already know. 

as time goes by

Before work, I stop in to have my morning tea in the grad lounge.  A few friends from my cohort, and some from the year behind mine, teach summer classes for high schoolers on campus.  While I take my tea, they lesson plan and grade papers, and we catch up about our weekends, or our upcoming adventures.  There's a bookshelf just outside the lounge full of books free for the taking.  It's magical.  Last week, new books appeared on it everyday.  These are old books, full of markings, with breaking spines.  Or new books, that a professor decided they did not really need cluttering their office or home.  Regardless, I love it.  I love all of the books.  So far, I've managed to pick up seven titles, including Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness, neither of which I've read, and a few anthologies of short stories and creative non-fiction.  And plays, too.  I've taken from the shelf some Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard works that I've never owned before, but that I'm excited to read now, after having seen or studied a performance.

Then, the tea drunk, and perhaps some peanut butter crackers eaten, I walk the short path to the library to begin the days work.  I retrieve whatever part of my collection I need from the stacks, and I set up in the work room or the processing room, reading old correspondence, filing it into folders, imposing organization upon a cluttered mess of papers.  Many people today lament the lost art of letter writing, but I feel like I didn't realize how lost it was until the past few weeks.  My collection alone boasts hundreds upon thousands of letters.  Yet, it's not the number that's been lost; it's the conversation.  Perhaps it's simply that I'm reading letters from a rather literary crowd in the 1920s, so their turns of phrase ring with poignancy, but then, perhaps the 1920s was just a different time for the English language.  Certainly, it was a very different time for the average English-language speaker.

And while today the writing of a few select blogs and one or two e-mails makes me pause to relish the beauty of the words and the ideas behind them, most of them are written haphazardly, dashed off in an instant, or written to conform to some kind of lowest-common denominator standard.  Few writers pause, and thus, I think, few readers pause.

Worse, few friends take the care required to compose a worthy letter, or even e-mail, and thus, few friendships deepen via correspondence.  Fewer observations are recorded, and perhaps, fewer observations are made.  We are so hasty.  Not that the 1920s was a slow time-- there were telegrams and telephones-- but most of life did not move quite literally at half the speed of light.  A few things required an actual immediate response in the sense that we associate with immediacy (accomplished via telegram), but most 'immediate' responses could be given at the earliest a day later.  In general, correspondents had at the least a whole night to mull over a missive before needing to send a response.  Life moved much more slowly, and, in many cases it seems, thoughtfully.

Yet, before I wax all rosy-glasses, I must add: things haven't changed all that much in the last hundred years.  War was still horrific, lovers still faithful or untrue by turns, oranges delicious.  Americans still crave terrible boxed 'American' food even in the bounty of delicious foreign local cuisine, and everyone has plenty of room to wonder, "What kind of world are we living in?"  Just as my satire class last year proved to me that seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers critiqued many of the same things about their society that I find wrong with my own, these letters reinforce-- on a much smaller, more intimate scale-- the noble, terrible, humorous, and dull-- but essentially unchanging-- nature of humanity.