Alchemy and Other Core Courses

Last August I spent my programming breaks in the grass around 156 Western Avenue reading a book I'd borrowed from a friend.

Meanwhile, in California, a college friend was reading the same book. In Greece a cousin was beginning it. In New York a section leader had just put it down.

Harvard's real common ground this summer--the story that spanned major, gender, age and summer job--was not public service, activism, the Internet, the presidential election, or cell phones. It was Harry Potter.

My friends look up from The Goblet of Fire to report that Harry Potter is an escape: a nice easy read, a page-turner, a no-brainer. But the statistics point to something larger. Fox News reports that 43% of the Harry Potter books sold were bought by people over 14 who were not buying the books for a child.

It's more than escapism, trickle-up reading or a return to childhood: Harry Potter is the new mythology, a mythology that resonates strongly with Harvard students.

Harry's story speaks first and foremost to a feeling most of us swoon at: the feeling of being deliberately, carefully, and specially chosen. Though he hadn't known it, Harry was destined to be a wizard--he had the mark of greatness on him. It just took someone with the right eyes to see it.

It began simply enough. After years of life in a Muggle (non-wizard) family, being made to feel quite uninteresting and ordinary, Harry received a mysterious letter admitting him to the study of high magic at Hogwarts, a kind of boarding school. Though surprised at his own admission, once at Hogwarts, Harry learned that other kids--the legacies--have looked forward to coming their whole lives.

Sound familiar?

In the good Puritan tradition, we'd love to be the elect. But what we're chosen for is important as well. Not only was Harry hand-picked, he was hand-picked to learn magic. This is no ordinary task, but something on which the world depends: a matter of good and evil, of plugging yourself into these great unknown forces and currents swirling around the globe.

Hogwarts is the place where great secrets are revealed, where alchemy and transfiguration are Core requirements. Hogwarts students can enter secret passages in everyday cities and are given unusual powers over the natural world and its ordinary inhabitants. Deep underneath the school, the Sorcerer's Stone--the secret to wealth and eternal life--is being held for safekeeping.

Has anyone checked the stacks lately?

Like most generalizations, this one is not foolproof. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: who's to say whether the university fits the mythology, or the mythology fits the university? And sure, there are levels on which this is just a story, surrounded by self-perpetuating hype.

But the same could be said of so many things: jobs, government, reputations.

Harvard is a passionate and opinionated community, and not all our passions and opinions were unleashed on H.P. (I, for example, may be the only one thrilled that Ralph Nader's web site is run on Linux). But we're choosing a new president for our country and our university, and these issues seem less relevant to our own lives than Quidditch matches across the pond.

But the larger issues are not to be missed. Harry Potter's story begins as a story of being chosen. We are beyond this, faced with the larger, more immediate problems of choosing. When Harry received his summons, he chose to go, and to accept the responsibility that came with it. Though much less exciting than the heavens splitting open, it's our individual choices which make future mythologies possible.

Enjoying the same fairy-tale makes for great dinner-table conversation, but we have to be able to bring it back. Magic is simply the crystallization of a power to change, and becomes wizardry or sorcery depending on how it is used. In Harry Potter's world, there is a third option: to be a Muggle, one without magic.

But this is not an option in ours. We must beware that greatest of all temptations: the belief that all that time leading up to the moment of choice is morally neutral. This temptation promises that we're not responsible for electing a president unless we vote; we're not responsible for our actions until we become self-aware; that we haven't really picked a post-graduate job until we are happy with it.

Change is a burning-away, like the dragon's egg hatched in fire: a sudden birth, sometimes painful. Power comes in the ability to transform, the ability to withstand transformation, and to prevent it when necessary.

But power is not simply the ability to pick: it is the responsibility to not not pick.

Not all transformation is positive; there is a huge difference in the transformation of power and transformation by agency. Evil is that which takes you over and changes you in ways you cannot control--like unicorn's blood in Harry's woods.

Our charge, as minor magicians, begins simply: to stand up for the change we like and defend that which we do not; to recognize the world as interconnected enough that our actions matter. Because after being chosen, we have to choose--and it's scarier, larger, harder than being chosen. But it completes us.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House.