Harry Lives.....

So, Harry Potter survives after all. The Boy who Lived, comes through in the end , against all the odds, vanquishing the dreaded Dark Lord, winning his lady love and settling down to a long and peaceful life dedicated to rearing kids, apparating between a 8 to 5 job , growing tubers in his garden on weekends perhaps….all in all, comfortable in the security of relative oblivion, with his family, friends, and memories of his heroic deeds . All this at the cost of a few, probably disposable, friends and allies ( possibly to keep a somber mood).
Isn’t that what everyone wanted…hordes of youngsters, adults, and greybeards alike had been pleading with Ms Rowling for the best part of 2 years, yearning for that ‘lived happily ever after….good conquering evil- love conquering hate’ ending. So are we satisfied? The majority , I do not doubt are, including the redoubtable author, to whom, if for nothing else, I doff my hat yet again for a brilliant narration and some genuinely fantastic creativity. The book , no doubt, will beat all previous collections by some margin, especially now that the people have been given the ending that they evidently craved.
Ah, but after all the hullaballo ,how so incredibly human and predictable a finale. Would children world over, have been able to sleep at night if it was Harry who had come out worse in the final struggle with his evil nemesis. What comfort would the people trapped in this misenchanted isle of daydreams called humanity have found if for once ‘good’ had failed to prevail over ‘evil’. What answers would Rowling have provided her legions of fans if , as Dumbledore called it , if Harry’s greatest weapon, his power to love, had come up miserably short against the malice of Voldemort.
For me Rowling had in her hands, the veritable chalice to creative immortality of a kind scarce attained , if she’d chosen to end her tale in a kind of equilibrium more suited to reality. Most of her characters were either too black or white , and the amount of white left unscathed at the end , made the whole scenario so bright, it hurt the eyes. Ah, for an ending like Tolkien’s masterpiece - “The Silmarillion”, which I consider , philosophically if not creatively (The Lord of the Rings has to come first in that regard) the most defining in the entirety of creative fantasy. Even the LotR, for its seemingly glorious finale, conveys a more than subtle gloom the very end to those who could discern it, in the form of the final waning of the firstborn in Middle-earth and the passing of the last remnants of the Eldar over the sea.
Without a doubt, as the years have numbered , the sheer mystique of literary characters has lessened considerably. Is it merely the power of the market that makes otherwise endowed authors mellow their characters and creations, or is it a tedious change into the well trodden path of memetic humanoid ‘values and social systems’. Can we possibly dream of a modern day Heathcliff, for me, the most fascinating character in all Literature, or say a Hamlet, a Dorian Gray …or even a Holmes ,with his single mindedly calculated and wonderfully unemotive persona.
Oh, for a tale akin to Orwell’s chilling 1984 or the equally memorable tale of Atticus Finch and his children.
Why do we so ardently seek escape in the form of perfection as envisaged by our culturally branded philosophies of good and bad….is it because reality has little, if anything to offer, at all ? Or perhaps, we are cocooned so securely and irrevocably in our little shells built built right from the times of childhood cathecism, that anything to the contrary seems well nigh unthinkable and outrageously blasphemous.
Is there one out there, to give us a welcome throwback to the days of old…the days when Charlotte Bronte remarked of her own sister’s creation… “I scarce think it is wise to create a character like Heathcliff…”, is there one to challenge the incumbent orthodoxy that humanity so comfortably seems to have slipped in….for me, in the present day, Gaiman with his wonderfully subdued hero Morpheus, is the only one who perwades beyond the tried and tested regimens of human acceptance…..Robert Jordan too seemed a likely contender, but he has let the narration meander far too long ; still it will be interesting to see what he has in store for Ran al’Thor and the rest of the cast of “The Wheel of Time”
……as for Potter, wishing him the best of a human life.

Dreams

The misty gloom at the fall of eve,
May serve to heal , and sever, from its wounded core;
The restless mind, and lend it wings,
Bid it speed to yonder surreal shore.
To rest awhile on fair starlit sward,
Sound the hunt in untamed beech and oak.
Scale the ancient snowy peaks,
Kingly clad in pearly moonlit cloak.
Or mayhap if thou glory seeks,
To fall or fell in the fields of death;
Which shall recount for ages hence,
The deeds of valour in one enamoured breath.
Walk in awe the enchanted streets,
‘Mongst heady fumes of incense divine,
Where bards create ecstatic harmonies,
Whence the maidens dance , and their lovers pine.
Hold converse with sages wise
On life and death and the unseen beyond.
Watch the forgotten tales, brought back
To life, with a wave of some enchanted wand.
Meetings aplenty in the Elysian fields,
With enlightened faces, burden free.
Soon perhaps your day might come,
To cross the river at the anointed fee.