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All the Waiting Put Together
Update (1 August): I finished the book earlier today, and am busy re-reading parts to clarify my thoughts about it. A review is planned (but given my track record, hardly guaranteed.
I think I’ll need to hide under a rock for the next couple of weeks.
Tonight is Release Night, but I won’t be reading the last Harry Potter book until the end of July at the very earliest. Which would be fine if I didn’t give a damn about being spoiled—but I do. I totally do. And that fact, more than anything else, is making me afraid of interacting of my fellow human beings.
I’m hesitant about leaving my apartment tomorrow. I’m tempted to turn off my phone entirely. I’ve closed my feed reader and temporarily banned it from my dock, in a (probably vain) attempt to not read any blog posts about it. I won’t be visiting any of my usual internet haunts until I’ve got the last tome in my hands and finished reading it. Hell, I have email in my inbox from friends who are die-hard Harry Potter fans that I won’t be reading for quite a while—just in case.
I look at what I’m doing and not doing, and the rational part of me is very disgusted by how wrapped up I’ve become in all this nonsense. This is, after all, exactly the sort of hysterically overblown pop culture phenomenon I normally disdain. And yet…
For those who have read the series in real time, the Harry Potter books have been as much about waiting as anything else. There was a unique sort of frustration that came after finishing the latest volume—the one that took months or years to get here: after all that waiting, there were four or six or eight hours of relief. But afterward? There was yet another pause, a space for still more waiting. For much of the English-speaking world, after the next day or so, that won’t be true anymore. And, somehow, that finality is more precious, more meaningful, and yet more frustrating, than all the waiting put together.
I have friends in other time-zones who have already gotten their hands on Deathly Hallows and are no doubt reading it voraciously as I type this. By the time they get around to reading this, it will likely be all over for them. And this time, there will be nothing more to wait for.
So, as I bury my head back into the rapidly multiplying work-related sand over the next week or so, I am trying to preserve what I can, to hold on to what many other human beings will no longer have. It’s disdainful and it’s arguably selfish, but that’s the truth of it.
In a few hours, many in the world will have finished their adventures at Hogwarts, but I’m still determined to hold on to the waiting and its special magic.
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