On Harry's Last Stand and Insights where You Least Expect Them

Harry's Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down, and What We Can Do to Save It by Harry Leslie Smith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I must admit that when I first saw this book and it's title, I assumed this would be the usual rant us younger folk expect from the elderly - you know about how easy we have it and how lazy we are and yada yada yada. So I did not bother to look any further until I saw this interview with him that justkissmyfrog posted on her youtube channel.

He was nothing like I imagined him to be. He was funny, compassionate and still so in touch. Yeah, we do not really expect that from the elderly. And as with all generalizations it is obviously not true across the board. I am a little ashamed of my initial judgement. Especially with my background I should be more aware of prejudices. But alas I realized my mistake and turned to his book for more of what he had to say.

And boy did he have a lot to say and in such a charming manner. He really lived a remarkable live that would have been a shame to be lost to oblivion. But he has got a nobler reason for telling his story than fishing for compliments or sympathy. He uses it to illustrate a point about our current state of affairs and the course we are on - not just in Britain, but across the board.

I certainly recognized some of the issues to be akin to some here in Germany. But while I for the most part did share his opinion even before I picked up this book, I never thought to look at it from quite this angle. That did help untangle some of my jumbled thoughts and see the proverbial golden thread running through. So while he does not give easy answers - neither does he claim to - I do have a little more clarity and something to orient my decisions.

Of course, whenever these things sound simple and easy answers are thrown about, you are probably not seeing the whole picture. They are always more complicated and we should be aware of that lest we comply with rash actions or unfavorable agendas.

I suppose the best we can do is to raise awareness, to not forfeit our votes - even if just to delude the less well meaning ones, to try and do more good than harm to the world around us, and, last but not least, to sometimes look beyond our prejudices. We might just hit upon gold where we would least expect it.



View all my reviews

On Never Ever Growing Up

I very vividly remember how I told my mom one night when she was tugging me in that I never ever wanted to grow up. And this was not just me being hung up on Peter Pan. I actually meant it ... and I kind of still do.

Back then there were just so many things about grown-ups I was terrified of and things they did I thought I could never do on my own. Like doing my hair and driving a car or dancing in public (unchoreographed that is, like in a club) and all that stuff in between. But bid by bid I learned to do those things or had those experiences and it turns out that some of them are actually a lot of fun.

So do I feel like a grown up now? No. Not yet. And I am actually starting to suspect that I never will. It seems like for every milestone I leave behind another two are rising up before me. Life apparently is not the kind of game where you reach the final level and you have won. There will always be new challenges to tackle. Challenges that are going to make me feel like that scared little child over and over again. Maybe a child that is a little more mature than it's younger version, but a child nonetheless.

So the number of my age gets farther and farther removed from the age I feel. To the effect that I now earn alarmed looks whenever I have to actually think a moment to give my age or even get it wrong. Except today on my birthday, when I will be very aware and weirded out by that stranger of a number.

  

Me and Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have got to say up front that Mrs. Dalloway put me through the most difficult reading process I ever made it through (and I have read a lot of academic texts, Egyptian tomb inscriptions and stuff). That was not because it is a bad book. It is because Mrs. Dalloway is not so much a book in the conventional sense with plot and such. It is basically a herd of consciousnesses invading your mind and running rampant. It is often hard to follow whose head you just switched into. It is somewhat like what I imagine being a mind reader must feel like. It's so utterly exhausting; like you wouldn't believe. I had to stop and take a break about every 30 pages and re-motivate myself to move on.

But while it was painful and hard to get through, it was also very rewarding and worth the effort in the end. It is hard to believe that this was first published in 1925. I mean, for example, how could this women so accurately (from what I understand at least) describe PTSD and recognize it as the serious illness that it is - long before it even became a diagnosis? And how come that it took the medical community so much longer to come to that same conclusion? (Their arrogance again and again their stupid arrogance. Like Woolf rightly recognized. And most infuriatingly still, they just don't learn from that mistake ever, it seems. Not from this. Not from the whole “gentlemen's-hands” debacle. Never. But I digress.)

All that would have been remarkable enough on it's own, but that is actually not the only issue she is surprisingly spot on about – again especially considering when this was written. She manages to step into the heads of all these characters and accurately portray them; young and old, male and female, everyone unique and life-like (i.e. with real issues); it's baffling. It makes me wonder if my paranoia about some people maybe being able to read my thoughts might have been justified after all …



View all my reviews

On Grief

Grief is a somewhat curious process. It is definitely not this step by step process they say it is. It's not like you master one level and go on to the next. At least for me it is not. What really happens is more like flipping back and forth between the stages. Like you think you grasp this new reality now and you're mind is otherwise occupied for a while or you sleep, but then you look up and - wham - it hits you again and you are right back where you started.

Then you are back to asking yourself if this really is the new reality now? If this is a world now in which this person no longer exists? Or if it has all just been a bad dream? Which might sound like a horrible cliche, but it is how I feel - or at least the most fitting articulation of this feeling that I can think of. Or maybe I think of it, precisely because it is such a cliche and my mind is just so occupied processing the new reality and in no condition to come up with more original expressions.

However that may be, it is not the worst part of the experience. The worst part is not even the guilt about all the bad things you ever thought or said about them. That will go away pretty soon. No, the worst part is the self-deprecating question of whether or not you were close or invested enough to justify your pain – no matter how close or closely related you actually where, I might add. And I don't know if this is just me or if other people feel this as well, because this is the particular monster I never dare to touch upon in conversations. Funerals are the habitats it really thrives in - among all those other people and their pain and anecdotes about things you were hitherto totally oblivious about - there and then it gets its biggest growth spurt. And this monster stays with you even after the worst of the pain has passed. And its company makes the next of its kind thrive even better. Maybe that is one reason why I get so much more affected the older I get and the more people cease to be.

I remember my first funeral. It was a somewhat distant relative that I had seen a couple of times, but was never close to. My grandmother said it would be good for me to come for “practice.” So that it would not be as bad when it was someone that had mattered more. She could not have been more wrong. This is not the kind of thing you can practice. I know that now. I don't know if she does.

I have been to several funerals at this point and merely one wedding. What does that say about me? I study cultures from the past – their relationship with their dead and funeral rites among other things. And I have come to think that funerals are more for the living then they are for the dead. The question is for which of the living? Not me, evidently, because funerals do not give me closure or comfort like I know they do for some other people - on the contrary. My grieving and healing happens elsewhere in much more private venues and rituals.

On Why Hogwarts is a Terrible School

So I've just read the Harry Potter Books ... for the first time. It's 2014. I know I've been late to the party - as usual. I had my reasons. Anyway, now that I've read the books, liked them and look at the fandom, I kind of wonder ... am I the only person who wouldn't want to go to Hogwarts?

I just don't think it would be such a nice place to be if one actually went there. For one thing, there is the division into different houses. What does that do, besides creating animosity - especially since they have them competing against each other for the House and Quidditch Cup. I guess some would argue that shared goals and responsibilities make the students within every one house bond and look after one another. But we see in the books that it doesn't work quite like that - as was to be expected. Because, you see, when somebody messes up and jeopardizes the victory they're gonna have a pretty hard time in their own house. And inter-house friendships prove to be rather difficult to maintain, since there hardly is any neutral place to hang out. You're likely not going to sit with people from other houses during meals. You can hardly have a conversation in the library. And besides that, where in the castle could people from different houses hang out? You're left with the grounds or the toilets, maybe the Room of Requirement.

And this is, I think, where the crux of the matter lies. You're not really supposed to mingle. The division of the houses is really sort of a divide and conquer strategy. One that has clearly gotten out of hand, since the teachers are as invested in the rivalry as the students are and even the parents. Because to many parents it is very important that their children end up in the "right" house - as illustrated by Sirius Black. And though the Weasley's wouldn't have been quite as harsh as that, had any one of the kids ended up in a different house, it would have surely impacted his status in the family. Because this isn't just about where you're dormitory is, it's basically a stigma. If you end up in Slytherin, people from other houses are going to assume that you're a criminal in the making. And people from your own house are going to make sure that your believes line up, if they don't already do. I think this system was largely responsible for the failure of Snape and Lily's friendship and why he ultimately ended up with the Death Eaters.

The other things that really bothers me about Hogwarts are the curriculum and the teaching methods. I find the curriculum rather narrow. It's almost entirely devoted to the use of magic (or magical creatures and substances), whereas the questions of understanding magic, ones own origins or the world at large hardly get touched - even in such subjects as History of Magic, Care of Magical Creatures and Muggle Studies. Neither seems critical reasoning much encouraged. It is not surprising therefore that even "good" wizards such as Ron hold some rather alarming believes and attitudes. And that despite the fact that most wizards have Muggle relations, not even the people from the ministry's Muggle related departments understand the most fundamental things about them or other magical creatures for that matter.

In general there seems to be hardly anyone concerned about ethics. The teachers only make their students brew the potions, practice the charms and what not. They hardly provide any context or caution. The best wizard according to Hogwarts standards is the one who can use magic to the greatest extent and in the most complicated ways - not the one who uses it most wisely. There is no real discourse on the line between use and abuse, which also makes the subject of Defence Against the Dark Arts hard to define, since the Dark Arts themselves are kind of a wishy-washy concept. There is some general idea that they are magical implements that are clearly intended to be used to somebody's disadvantage. But that could be said about most magical practice. And it is clear that even the unforgivable curses are not exclusively used by bad people. Hell, Harry himself uses two of the three.

Then there are the teaching methods. In general Hogwarts seems to operate under the false assumption that when you are good at something you are also good at teaching it. That is obviously not the case as nicely illustrated by Professor Binns, who holds his History of Magic monologues barely even aware of the students' presence, as well as Snape, who just writes the potions recipes on the blackboard and makes them hand in the results at the end of each lesson. And the essays they have to do for almost every subject are usually not more than senseless occupational therapy. Though, to be fair, on that particular account Hogwarts probably doesn't differ all that much from regular schools, but for the fact that the essays are for the most part mere practical recitations of the how-to-variety rather than critical reflections. The other very Hogwarts-specific problem is that the teachers - especially the heads of houses - have got an underlying agenda and hardly even make a show of treating students equally fair to put it mildly.

All in all I think Hogwarts, though certainly a fascinating place, is not a great environment if your ambition is to become a well educated and responsible wizard. In a way it is like our schools on steroids, but we at least get taught where we come from and how we work - usually that is.

On New Year's Resolutions

The Year is already a couple of days old by now and I still keep getting bombarded with New Year's Resolutions left and right. Though I find some people's resolutions rather interesting to know, I'm not a big fan of them. I've never made any actually. I have goals, all right, but they tend to kind of evolve rather naturally all year round and I adjust them once I see how things are going. Because with most goals you tend to under- or overestimate the difficulties you'll be facing. There are always things you just can't foresee and you need your goals to be flexible enough to take that into consideration.

That's also one of the reasons I don't like telling people about my goals at first. It puts you in that all or nothing mindset, because they'll hold you to what you said.  So that instead of being proud of the progress you have made towards your goal, you'll feel like you failed and give up all together. And then there's also some evidence that suggests that for people who are in it for the social appraisal - or whatever you want to call it – the declaration of the goal and the ensuing admiration from other people are satisfying enough and they might not even bother to get started. Like displaying pretentious books that you never intend to read on your shelves. I don't know, if I ever done something of that kind. I don't think so, but my adolescent self was kind … well, I don't get what she was thinking most of the time. And people tell me things that I can hardly believe. So I wouldn't entirely rule it out. It's like I've been possessed for a really long time. Evil spirit be gone.

However, I didn't achieve everything I wanted to before the New Year, but I don't see that as a failure. It's not like I haven't achieved anything. It just means that it's an ongoing process. And considering the circumstances, I'm actually quite satisfied with what I've managed to accomplish last year.