What Harry Potter can teach us about life
Unlike Trump and Clinton, J.K. Rowling tells us pain is integral to human experience
This political convention season, as in all political convention seasons, two distinct narratives have emerged.
There’s the Trumpian narrative of crisis: that dystopic world of murderous illegal immigrants, political corruption and middle-class malaise. It’s a narrative that any party in opposition is, to some degree, forced to embrace, but Trump has been spitting out a uniquely terrifying spin.
And there’s the competing Democratic narrative, trumpeting the merits of Clintonian continuity, of incremental change and of trust in proven qualification.
Last week, the Democrats strove to offer an assurance that, minor ideological differences aside and the omnipresent fat-cat lobbyists notwithstanding, they were the only leaders who could and would keep us all safe in our treacherous world, as one baton was passed, steadily, to another.
“She’s been there for us,” President Barack Obama said, tellingly, of the former rival he now fervently hopes will become his successor. “Even if we haven’t always noticed.” In the middle of all that, I went to London to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Fantastical escapism? Not at all. Once you got past all the talk of Hogwarts and Quidditch, Gryffindor and Slytherin, muggles and Dementors, the take-away of the entire breathtaking enterprise was perfectly clear.
It was grasped by everyone in the theatre.
Pain will come. Donald Trump cannot prevent it. Hillary Clinton can’t, either.
In fact, J.K. Rowling and her collaborators were saying, as Rowling has been saying for years through her magnificent Harry Potter books, that pain is an integral part, actually the defining part, of the human experience, given that we all will lose many of those we love.
There’s no way to avoid that pain, and to delay or to deny it actually just makes it worse. What matters is how you deal with it, how you teach your children about what lies ahead for them, how well you listen to them, and how honest you dare to be with them about your fears and how honest you dare to be with yourself.
To put all that another way, we will not remain safe, convention promises notwithstanding. Understanding that reality is perhaps the most challenging aspect of our time on this planet and yet the most crucial of life’s lessons.
Of those three world views, I found Rowling’s to be the most honest and the most useful. That probably explains why the diverse, international audience at that theatrical performance in London was held in rapt attention for six hours, longer than even Trump would dare to speak, in contrast with the crowd of unmoved, cynical, furtive-eyed travellers with whom I watched the Republican nominee’s address to his crowning convention.
You might argue this is an unfair comparison. Rowling, a writer of fiction, can deal with metaphysical issues with impunity, offering balm for the soul and succour for the spirit.
History teaches us that politicians who wade into those deep waters do so at their peril — conventional political wisdom being that these personal, moral, spiritual things are best left alone, lest division be sown or mistakes be made. Better by far to stick to policy.
Except that these conventions don’t stick to policy, of course. They’re shows themselves. Their engine is narrative. Their uber-text is our lives. They’re just weak narratives when you stack them to up to those from a master of the form. Like Rowling.
Watching Harry Potter and the Cursed Child — you can now buy the text — you feel like the human species has finally reached a more enlightened place.
In the place of the elitism, authoritarianism and bottled-up emotion of our Dickensian industrial past, Rowling lays out an inclusive, openhearted, non-exceptionalist philosophy for life, one marked by realism, honesty and communal responsibility across the globe.
It’s hardly a Trumpian view — unless you are listening to Lord Voldemort — for she is arguing that we’re all immigrants, all strangers in a strange land, all insecure, struggling souls looking for happiness and trying to do the best for our kids.
But it also doesn’t pretend that our leaders can protect us from our worst.
Moreover, there is something about this Rowling vision that makes it consumable by multiple generations at once, a contrast with the division between, say, the Bernie Sandersloving millennials and the older Clintonian pragmatists of the Democratic Party.
That’s another weakness of these conventions; they do not know how to address different generations at the same time.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is not so different, actually, from LinManuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Sure, Miranda uses a real Founding Father as his narrative canvas, not a young wizard.
But if you go to Hamilton, you leave with the same sense of the evolved human species — the same understanding of the power of creativity, the crucial spirit of adventure and idealism, the same implied statement that it is those who first feel they don’t belong who tend to get the job done. And yet, Alexander Hamilton knows pain. He loses a child. And thus the show makes clear that achievement on a global scale — even the writing of the great Constitution of the United States — will immediately then disappear into a veil of sadness.
Like Harry Potter, Miranda’s Hamilton is an idealist who must confront deep sorrow and personal loss. Both ultimately find redemption. We crave such narratives. This is why both shows will make the kind of money that could buy all kinds of political influence, were it spent that way.
Watching Trump in Cleveland, it felt like we’d evolved hardly at all. Watching his opposition, it felt like nobody wanted to speak the full truth.
At least both conventions featured a candidate introduced by their daughter; their most authentic moments.
That’s another article of Rowling and Miranda faith: We’re all better off with a family, imperfect as any family turns out to be, lest we spend our lives looking for them even as we try to prove ourselves worthy of our office.
Pain will come. Donald Trump cannot prevent it. Hillary Clinton can’t, either. As Rowling has been saying for years through her books, what matters is how you deal with it, how honest you dare to be with your kids about your fears and how honest you dare to be with yourself