Harry, I miss you already

Warning: This blog loosely discusses the final Harry Potter book

Last night I finished the final book of the Harry Potter series, and I loved it. Part of me, a large part, wanted to skip ahead and read the end, because in the course of reading it over the past week my nervous anxiety about what was going to happen has been killing me. However, I'm really glad I didn't, because it was excellent and worth waiting for. Her books have gotten progressively more swollen and sometime I fell like she draws out the suspenseful parts, to the point where I feel like I'm in agony. So a few times I did skip ahead to find out how a particular sticky situation would turn out (Gringots, anyone?).

What I especially liked about the book was how Harry had to deal with the fact that the his heros and authority figures are just human. Flawed humans. That's a painful realization to come to. I don't know if its a universal human tendency, but its definitely my tendency to idealize people. I often put people I am impressed by on pedestals, eventually become disappointed by something they do, and then feel disgusted in them. I thought that was all really well played out in through Harry's relationship with Dumbledore.

Furthermore, I enjoyed her treatment of death, which is an inevitable fact of life, yet many people's greatest fear. However, in real life, people dont come back from the dead, and that was a hard part for me. I am glad that Harry lived and got to have a life, that is the only ending I would have been satisfied with, but I found myself crying quite hard when Harry was marching to die, because it reminded me of losing my friend Tucker, and she never came back from that, and she never will.

When I was in Mexico I started reading Carlos Castaneda's book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. The books chronicles Castaneda's apprenticeship with, Don Juan, a Yaqui shaman. I didn't get to finish the book, since it belonged to a juice bar in Mahahual and we were only there for a few days, but in the beginning, Don Juan says that all life is leading towards death and that humans must accept this. I don't know why this is so hard for me, since it is logical and I have seen the proof in my own life, but it is.