Fiction and Life

If you haven’t read the seventh Harry Potter and are planning to—this post has some spoilers.

I finished it this afternoon, sitting in my backyard. Midway through chapter 33 I started crying. Harry Potter was going to be killed—he wouldn’t grow up, he wouldn’t even see the end of all the horror. And it was that horror that made me cry, too. That things were so dark, that people lived in fear and couldn’t move about and live freely. That he saw the bodies of his friends.

It felt ridiculous that I listened to the leaves rustling in my backyard and thought about these tragedies. JK Rowling writes fiction, so it wouldn’t ever matter what happened to Harry Potter the literary character. But I was bothered, in the back of my mind, by how that battle scenes and dying aren’t restricted to works of fiction. And that real battles aren’t so clearly divided between good vs. evil. Real life is so much more complicated than that—good and bad are all mixed together. Like in Iraq. I imagine both sides (if there even were clearly defined sides) feel they are fighting for country and for a good government and for freedom.

I had always wondered, had I been born in the midst of the American Revolution or in Nazi Germany or during the Civil Rights movement, what I would have done. I wonder what side I would have joined—or if I would have even recognized what was going on around me. I have a feeling that, in such extraordinary circumstances, I would have kept my head down and my nose clean. Which makes me feel guilty.