Harry Potter and the Three Steps of Growing Up

In Sault Ste Marie, my remote Canadian hometown, we got everything late.

Movies came out months after their release in the US; books were released later and at much higher prices; television shows took longer to catch on; even fashions reached us by the time they were obsolete elsewhere. It’s almost as if the radio-waves themselves had to take to the highways and make the long trek up north through the snow and trees, finally reaching our movie theaters and TV sets panting and sweaty.

It was the 90s, and I was growing up in the land of the latecomers.

One thing we did get a little earlier than the US was British stuff. Including Harry Potter.

THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

You can learn something about a person by asking them the title of the first Harry Potter book. If they’re from the US, they’ll say The Sorcerer’s Stone. If they’re from the rest of the world, it’ll be The Philosopher’s Stone.

That’s not the only difference between the US and British versions of the books. The covers are worlds apart too. The British covers, or the Canadian covers as I thought of them, were bright, bold, and, frankly, childish. Each book had a predominate color. Stone was red; Chamber, blue; Azkaban, purple. The designs and illustrations looked almost like a lousy version of Quentin Blake. Crudely outlined Harrys with big swathes of filled-in color.

Frankly, I was not intrigued by the Harry Potter books at first.

But when my mom somehow got her hands on the American version, I was sold.

THE SORCERER’S STONE COVER

A sandstone colonnade spans a length of dewy, nighttime grass. Both ends are obscured by lush curtains. In the distant twilight, under a lavender sky, stands a hulking castle. An owl with big gold eyes sweeps into the foreground from the left, toward a glittering key. To the right is the boy: in jeans and a gold/red shirt, with a tussle of black hair, round glasses, and of course, the bright red scar, the boy, soaring on his broom, reaches up to catch a tiny brass-colored orb.

There are a few other gems that only reveal themselves on a second or third examination: to the right, just peeking out of the curtain, is a grey hand holding a candle above an extended, berobed leg. Behind one of the columns toward the left is an ominous figure in a purple robe with a flowing white beard and white, staring eyes. In the background, a majestic, pellucid unicorn dashes across the meadow.

Mary Grandpré’s illustration for The Sorcerer’s Stone, although childlike in its own way, is simply much better executed than its British counterpart. It has magic. Mystique. She understands that the cover of a kids book must be intriguing. It must promise mystery, hint at features of the text, provide drama of its own, and, above all, establish an aesthetic. Which it does in spades.

As an eight year old kid, this is the book that I wanted my mom to read to me at night. So that’s what we did.

And while everyone else was associating it with Britain, I, the little Canadian boy in the middle of nowhere, thought of it only as a distinctly American book.

THE FAIRY TALE

Make no mistake. Harry Potter is a fairy tale. It’s also a lot of other things: a school story, a fantasy, a mystery. But if a story about a small, insignificant orphan living with unkind relatives who suddenly discovers he is magical, and is whisked away to a magnificent boarding school to have adventures, practice magic, and discover his uniqueness isn’t a fairy tale, what is?

THE APPEAL

Harry Potter spoke to me more than any other book, film, music or artwork.

Why? What is it that makes this such a uniquely beloved series?

It deals with the fundamental inner conflict that all children experience. The first paradox of feeling that we as humans are tasked with resolving. I’m talking about the tension between wanting to be special and wanting to blend in with the crowd. We spend our whole lives trying to resolve this tension which is not meant to ever be fully resolved.

We are born believing that we are the center of the world. What we call “growing up” is the process of decentralizing ourselves: of realizing, painfully and slowly, that we are not the center of the world.

What Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone does, and does with unique brilliance, is to both validate our desire to be unique and help us reconcile it with reality. The initial draw lies in the validation. The staying power lies in the reconciliation.

THE THREE STEPS OF GROWING UP

Harry Potter, sleeping under the stairs in the home of his uncaring aunt and uncle, is like us, the readers. Unexceptional. Prosaic. Unappreciated for what we suspect, in our deepest unremembered dreams, to be our exceptionalism.

1. Fulfill the child’s wildest dream. Harry Potter gets the letter. After the most strenuous efforts of his unmagical, quotidian family to keep him just as everyday as they are, he finally is able to read the truth: he really is special. Along comes Hagrid to prove this. “Harry, yer a wizard.”

2. Give the child more than they asked for. Not only is Harry finally special, finally elevated out of the ordinary. Now he’s even exceptional among the exceptional. Because of the scar on his forehead and the past he knew nothing about, he is “the chosen one.” The biggest celebrity in the wizarding world. Cue the dread of standing out. Cue the child’s fervent desire to do nothing but fit in.

3. Teach the child where to invest their emotional energy. Harry finally makes close friends in Ron and Hermione. He starts to learn that in order to resolve the dichotomy between being special and blending in, we have to construct our own community and invest it was precisely as much importance as we are comfortable with. Among our close friends, we both stand out and fit in. While, as mere humans, the opinions of strangers will always have some effect on us, it is with our friends that we’re able to healthily situate ourselves. In short, it is with our friends that we grow up.

MY OWN CHILDREN

I’ve got the ideal conditions for bedtime reading totally outlined in my head. All I need now are some kids.

1. One chapter a night. In my other entry to the Bedtime Stories challenge essay, I talk about The Hobbit, and how my mother would read one chapter of the book to me every night. Just one chapter; no more. This not only allows you to savor the cliffhangers and the general story-pacing that Rowling labored over with such deliberation. It prolongs the delight of the story. It lets you live with the story, in time. It makes the waiting just as valid a part of the story as the reading. Like how a rest in a piece of music may be silent, but is just as much inside the musical piece as the notes.

2. Always at night, in pajamas, in bed. When sleepiness sets in, when the sun goes down and the day is behind you, your inhibitions start to fade. Your imagination blooms like an evening primrose. A book like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone absolutely must be read at night. Really, any time someone reads a story to you, it should be at night.

3. Always read to, never reading. Being-read-to is a completely different experience than reading-to. Reading text aloud, especially for an extended period of time, can make it difficult to follow the text. You’re focusing on the tactile experience of formulating the words and the meanings of the sentences and phrases can take a back seat. If it’s tricky for an adult to read aloud, it’s really tricky for a kid. Besides, there’s a time and place for a kid to practice reading, and it’s not in bed, at night, with you.

4. I’m choosing the books. Harry Potter, The Hobbit, A Series of Unfortunate Events. I know what books are fit for my kid’s quickly-developing imagination. And I want to be the one in charge of choosing the books that I know will inflame it. A child’s development of love for reading always outpaces development of taste, and they’ll read and probably love most of what you put in front of them. Therefore it’s my job to pick the books. And we’re starting with Harry.

5. Push, but not too hard. It’s possible that my kid won’t want to be read to as much as I’ll want to read. God forbid, it’s even possible that they won’t be as interested in books as I was when I was a kid. I want to push for the experience. Kids, left to follow the impetus of their own will, might miss out on a lot of great experiences that if you just had given them a little push, they would have come to love. But you can’t push too hard, or they’ll just resent the experience. So if my kid wants to take a night or two off from reading, or a week off between books, that’s okay.

WHAT FOR?

Why do parents read their kids bedtime stories?

Because we want them to cultivate a rich inner life. We want to expose them to different aesthetic realms, to widen their little worlds and to show them different ways of interacting with that ever-widening world.

Harry Potter teaches us a lot of things: how to reconcile exceptionalism with timidity, how to be brave, how to investigate, how to make friends, how to discern friends from enemies, how to read the nuanced motivations of those around us. But the subtle underlying lesson it teaches its young readers is a more essential one: how to read and why.

When I first laid eyes on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with its dark, mysterious cover, I realized something that shook me and changed me forever. Escapism means escaping from yourself in order to come back around to yourself from a different angle. What you are escaping is your ruts of thought, your comfortable aesthetics, your learned lessons.

There are bold new worlds of imagination out there. Castles to be explored, villains to be fought, fears to be overcome. And all from the comfort of your bed, in your pajamas, to the sound of your mother’s voice.