With the release of the last Harry Potter movie we have come to the end of an era, one that author Lyn Fairchild Hawks might call the Dark Ages of Nought: the age of Harry Potter, the first decade of the 21st century.
It also corresponds to the true first blooming of the Internet and its transformation of our lives. It is a time of tragedy, uncertainty, and pessimism.
To me, the years 1988-1992 were the golden age of the 20th century. At this time, the Cold War was ending. We were optimistic about the future, because the age of nuclear terror was finally behind us. We weren't worried about Al-Qaeda, global warming, or the Great Recession.
Technology was relatively advanced, but not overwhelming: we had MS Word and HP laser printers (though dot-matrix was much more prevalent); we had car phones for jetsetters, pagers for doctors and repairmen, and public phone booths for everyone else. For information and entertainment, we had feature films, cable TV and newspapers and magazines.
Life like this could go on forever, or so I thought.
Today, there is an end-of-the-world feel to life, much more than when politicians insisted that any day could bring a nuclear war. During the Cold War, there was a sense of stability, of knowing that destroying ourselves with nuclear warheads was just stupid, a very remote possibility.
The anxieties of today hit way closer to home: global terror, global warming, the great global recession, are all embedded in our lives, everyday, reinforced by the ubiquitous World Wide Web.
The Dark Ages of Nought, indeed.
Does Harry Potter have anything to say about this doom-filled age of ours?
I must say I don't think so. I don't think Rowling is an extraordinary author with a contemporary message that hits home for our generation. I think she wrote a good story and got lucky, and she had the persistence and work ethic to exploit and mine every last farthing she could from the vein she hit.
I bought the last Harry Potter book and read the conclusion of the series, wondering if there would be something Rowling had held in reserve, something our imaginations had not yet conceived, something mindblowing that would cap off and confirm the billion dollars the world had spent on Harry. But the end was a confirmation for me. It was Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling. It was itself. Which is all we can ask of any author.
Rowling was extraordinary in this, that she kept working. That is her genius, and my hat's off to her for it. Recently, The Independent (UK) newspaper reported that an acclaimed fantasy author, Steph Swainston, has decided to call it quits and become a teacher. She can't take the demands of being a popular author, and wants to have a job where she's not sitting in her pajamas 12 hours a day by herself. "I suffer terribly from isolation while writing," she told the Independent. "I really need a job where I can be around people and learn to speak again. It's much, much healthier to be around people. Human beings are social animals."
That's a good message for me, writer and teacher that I am-- to remember that people, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world. In the middle of summer, at my most isolated, as I look towards a school year that seems far away but is roaring down upon me hour by hour, it's good to know that in this world there is such a thing as school, and we still meet there and learn, and that isn't likely to go away. At least I hope not.
After all, isn't that most popular of books, Harry Potter, set at a school?
Maybe there's a message there after all.
This is nicely said. But I remember those years as a kind of descent into irony. It was the beginning of the crisis in journalism. Newspapers and magazines were fat, but filled with celebrity gossip and snark. I suppose that's what happens when people have nothing serious to worry about.
- Laird
Posted by: Laird | July 12, 2011 at 04:47 PM
One thing I didn't mention was the Gulf War in 1991, which was also a beginning of our involvement with Iraq. 1993 was the year I got my first email account and saw my first web page using the Mosaic browser.
This is a great video about the Internet in 1981:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WCTn4FljUQ
Posted by: DF | July 13, 2011 at 08:29 AM
Well done, David. A world on the precipice of change, but a world in which school and learning are still relevant.
Regarding writing, I met Ron Hansen, one of my favorite writers, in Atlanta some years ago.I knew he taught in college and that his writing's following was still growing. When I asked him if he was able to write full time, he gave me an odd look and said, "Well, yeah. But who would want to?"
Posted by: Bob Mustin | July 13, 2011 at 10:02 AM
Not to mention our own Doris Betts, who once said that she wouldn't know what to do if she had to write full time. The economic necessity of a book a year (about which Swainston also complains) would have paralyzed her, she said.
Posted by: DF | July 13, 2011 at 02:41 PM