Preparing

My sister, brother-in-law, and I made a pilgrimage yesterday to the Harry Potter theme area at Orlando's Universal Studios. By the standards of other members of our generation, this was a decidedly belated voyage. The attraction has been open for a good ten years or so now, so we were late to the game. Speaking for myself, however, this did not in any way diminish the sense of wonder.

Harry Potter is a fantasy franchise perfectly suited to the tourist who, like myself, does not want to go on roller coasters. Sure, the place has its rides; but they can be skipped without forfeiting the overall experience. The real purpose is merchandizing, and among fantasy or sci-fi universes, is there any other that can boast so many in-universe stores, shops, and things to buy?

The prospect of purchasing was irresistible beyond all reason and practicality. I looked forward to the wand shop, although I do not in fact need an inert piece of wood or plastic to keep in a drawer at home. I was excited about the robe store, even though there is in fact - no matter how much it looks like it, comparatively speaking, inside the store - no such a thing as a Harry Potter-branded item of clothing that will seem understated and inconspicuous once you are back among the great muggle public.

My one great disappointment, however, was the complete lack of a store to buy Hogwarts textbooks. This really put me out.

Of course, I should not have been surprised. To sell such books, someone would have to write the words to put in them (which I would have been happy to do, had they asked me). Currently, the books they would read at Hogwarts do not exist, apart from the handful of short novelty ones that Rowling produced for Comic Relief, and those hardly go into the level of detail about the higher mysteries of Arithmancy I had in mind.

Realizing this brought on the first wave of truly Housman-esque levels of nostalgic despair. There is the land I cannot come again. There will be books I cannot ever read; experiences that cannot ever be lived out; dreams that cannot be made real - because they do not exist. If Wordsworth sang of that which "having been must ever be," we must suppose that there is also that which having never been can never be - Arithmancy textbooks among them.

This is, of course, why it is called "fantasy" in the first place - the genre to which the Harry Potter franchise belongs.

No sooner was I sad about this, however, than it occurred to me that there were innumerable real books that I have not and could yet read. Even if it is occult lore in particular for which I am hankering, the real world furnishes me with any number of Renaissance grimoires that I could crack open.

This makes a difference. The reason why the Hogwarts textbook fantasy appeals to us in the first place, when we first come to them as children, after all, is because that is how real books appear to us when we are small. There are too many of them, they are too large and obscure, they are secreted away in too many inaccessible libraries, for us ever to get our hands on them. They are filled with strange text and symbols that do not fully make sense to us.

Now that I am grown, however, I have access to the genuine article. I do not have to dream about forbidden lore or esoteric knowledge; I can go obtain it for myself. I can put aside childish things and live my real life, rather than fantasizing about what that life might one day be.

Of course, that which we can never have will always pull on us more than that we already have immediately before us. We are, as Pushkin observes in his Eugene Onegin, invariably drawn to the forbidden fruit. Who among us would not rather study Arithmancy than arithmetic? Herbology than botany? Transfiguration than chemistry?

It is not in human nature to be satisfied with the real at the expense of the fantasy, no matter how fulfilling and open to further development that reality might be. We will always find some way to make the fantasy greater in appeal. Thus children reading Harry Potter dream of being older, and adults returning to the books wish they could be children again.

As Julian Barnes puts it in his Flaubert's Parrot, speaking of one of the lessons of the French master's works: "the possibilities of the not-life will always change tormentingly to fit the particular embarrassments of the lived life.”

This may be a perennial truth. On the other hand, there is something distinctive about the fantasies to which the Harry Potter books appeal that is worth remarking here. It isn't just that they present us with a world of magic and imaginary creatures who do not exist in our naturalistic and rationally-determined world, the way all fantasy literature does. This is not merely a case of science once again "driving the naiad from her flood" (had to look it up to remind myself which poet perpetrated that grandiloquent image - ah, yes, it was Poe).

No, the nature of the Harry Potter fantasy is that it appeals to children's fantasies about distinctly real possibilities for their future lives. It permits them to dream about a future state in which they can learn subjects that were previously too abstruse or off-limits; where they can be admitted to schools for older children and young adults and win through social rites of passage.

And here I am, age thirty, and I either can do or have done already all those things. I might stand in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and long for my own letter of acceptance to Hogwarts; but I am forgetting, in that moment, that I have already attended an actual college - one based in part, by the way, on the same English models that inspired Rowling, and catering to the same Greyfriars fantasies.

I may long to read Hogwarts textbooks; but I am forgetting, when I do so, that I can read any actually-existing book I want- even ones with patently fantastical and otherworldly content.

Who needs Bethilda Bagshot's A History of Magic, that is to say, when one has at home Lynn Thorndike's 8-volume A History of Magic and Experimental Science?

Harry Potter enables young people to fantasize about what their future adult lives might be, in short. But does there not come a time when the future is now here, has finally arrived, we are living the only adult lives we are going to get, and it is time to pursue the real thing, rather than the simulacrum?

Many writers and critics on the subject of fantasy and genre literature before have recommended this course of action. Edmund Wilson, in his review of H.P. Lovecraft, condemns the adult readers of the master of weird fiction for remaining forever trapped in childhood.

Likewise, Gore Vidal, in his essay on the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novels, argues that they are all well and good as reading matter for kids, but that at some point, one's real life ought to take over as the center of one's interest.

"After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting," Vidal observes, "the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes. [...] Until recently I assumed that most people were like myself: daydreaming ceases when the real world becomes interesting and reasonably manageable. Now I am not so certain. Pondering the life and success of Burroughs leads one to believe that a good many people find their lives so unsatisfactory that they go right on year after year telling themselves stories in which they are able to dominate their environment in a way that is not possible in this over[-]organized society."

Reading Vidal's comments about his own journey from being a child who daydreams to an adult who actually lives his life, reminds me of a passage from Orwell. In his "Why I Write," he remarks that as a child, he would often imagine and think about his life in terms drawn from a hypothetical biography or memoir that might one day be written about it. He too, however - like Vidal - eventually gave up the habit, after real life took over from the fantasy version:

[F]or fifteen years or more, [he observes,] I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. [...] For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot[...]’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years.

When I first read those words, as a teenager, they were like a dart through me. I squirmed in an agony of self-recognition, because I knew that was precisely the sort of thing going on in my own mind all the time, and I hadn't realized it was childish.

Of course, at this point, I was in precisely the stage of life when this is an appropriate response to the world - precisely the age at which Orwell himself was engaged in this mental fantasizing. I did not know what my future would hold, however, and I feared I might never grow out of it.

What if I never began to have real-life adventures like Vidal's, which could take over satisfactorily from the fantasy ones? What if I never moved to Italy or slept with Jack Kerouac or wrote screenplays for Hollywood period epics?

I need not have feared. Of course, I have not done any of the things that Vidal did. But I have had my own adventures, and achieved things that would have seemed remarkable to my childhood self. In short, real life did eventually take over and consume my center of interest, just as it does for everyone else.

But why then the continued fascination among my generation for the fantasy-worlds of our childhood? We live in an age, after all, when Edmund Wilson's and Gore Vidal's writing off of the whole genre of fantasy seem decidedly old-fashioned. Authors like Lovecraft have risen in both popular acclaim and critical estimation. The "weird fiction" of yesteryear is taken seriously now in English departments and academic conferences. I'm sure even E.R. Burroughs had had an edited volume or two written about him.

Fantasy - and, more than that, any form of childhood nostalgia - is certainly alive and well.

I participate in this phenomenon as much as all other millennials, by the way, and I do not believe it deserves the contempt and derision that authors and critics of the past might heap upon it. It is simply in the nature of human beings that we aspire after that which we have not already attained - otherwise there would be nothing left to live for, the journey would be over, the story finished. Therefore, the habit of human fantasizing should scarcely strike us as surprising.

I wonder, however, if it is possible to channel our fantasizing in the direction of dreams that we might actually make real. The yearning after that which does not exist, after all, can only ever end in frustration. We cannot reach a goal, by definition, if it is not there to be reached.

We cannot read Hogwarts textbooks that no one in our universe has ever written. And so we will end with the same despairing conclusion that Yeats (the great would-be magus himself) had come to in early middle age, as quoted in Richard Ellmann's biography: "all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens."

Of course, times of preparation have their place in the human life span. Children should dream about the enormous strange books they might one day read, the forbidden knowledge they might one day possess, the schools they might one day attend.

But at some point in life, it comes time to stop dreaming about these things, and start doing them. To stop imagining possible schools, and enroll in one. To stop thinking up non-existent books, and read some actual ones. To stop planning for knowledge one might one day attain, and start attaining it. Let us not just prepare for something that never happens, but make it happen, when our preparations are finally behind us.

Easier said than done, of course. When it came down to it, I note, I was entirely unable to resist the temptation of purchasing - inside the innumerable Wizarding World of Harry Potter gift shops - of a notebook designed to look like a Hogwarts "Advanced Potion Making" textbook.

Inside of it, however, the pages of this notebook are of course blank. They have to be, since no such advanced potion making book exists. It is up for me to fill these pages with something real.

I believe I shall do so with my Harry Potter quill pen, which I also bought at the gift shop.