This is because I have zero memory of my past writings.
Dirty secret? When I'm bored with no reading material, I read this blog's old posts. Not only can I rediscover great music I forgot about, I am genuinely entertained by my own past entries. Some of them are quite good.
This is from this summer, apparently. Who knew?
Dear J.K. Rowling
Due to the nature of this letter, I want to get a few things out in the open as quickly as possible in case meaning is obscured by tone.
I have followed your books for a decade. I grew up with them. I, along with your 50 million other fans, fell deeply into your wonderful world ten years ago. Your work has been critically and publically adored, neither the numbers nor awards lie, and I can add little else other than my personal heartfelt thanks and admiration for a job masterfully done.
However, I have words of…not complaint, but of confusion. Compassion. Bereavement.
Today I read your final book, the Deathly Hallows, for the second time. For the other books my bragging “count” is higher, but I can only claim to have read this seventh book once (voraciously, in one sitting, the night it came out). I was forced to part with it soon after; when you are packing your belongings according to weight instead of importance you learn to sacrifice a 750-page book and its friends. Only after I finished it again did I realize today is in fact the two-year anniversary of its release, which seemed fitting.
As I read today (and tonight), I was continually reminded of forgotten memories, emotions, and reactions I had felt that night two years ago. My recollection of that night is blurry at best, charged as I was with adrenaline, excitement, apprehension, and (eventually) an overpowering sense of loss.
Much more so than the previous installments, due to the finality of it all.
I suspect you probably know the feeling.
Therein lies the problem. Now, I make no claim of comprehending your thinking or writing process. I can, however, construct a rough idea of what it must be like – purely by looking at the final result; the books themselves. I can’t imagine the feeling of having your story skyrocket into fame, but I assume it is accompanied by an overwhelming pressure.
You above all people knew the importance, the responsibility, of ending this right. After a certain point your world developed enough weight and force to continue on its own – your task was just to guide it to its inevitable conclusion. And again, I acknowledge I can’t comprehend what it must have been like. The story was yours.
And yet.
You took it too far. I think you got caught up in your efforts to draw every thread to the end, to tie everything. I think you got careless with your characters, each of which you spent seventeen years filling with life.
I understand that death was an important element of this story. I know it is integral to themes of growth and loss, courage and the inevitable. For the most part it was handled remarkably well, serving to further the darkening tone of the series book by book as more and more people were lost. Cedric. Sirius. Dumbledore. Necessary, functional, climactic, terrible, all of them. They were felt by the readers.
And we knew that the worst was not to come until the final confrontation, and we were fearful for our favorites, and still I as I re-read I remembered being shocked. Aghast, as central characters were claimed by the war.
It would not have been as bad, I suspect, if each death had been given respective weight, but the toll rose so steadily – relentlessly - that I began to write down names just to remember them all.
Before the first had time to truly sink in, we were confronted with another – which could have been a powerful literary technique, but it was done at such a pace as to cause disbelief.
Because of this, these characters were lost. They became defined by their last instance, their confusing and untimely death, and so their original selves were forgotten – or rather, glazed over.
(Muggle Studies Professor)
Hedwig
Mad-Eye Moody
- George loses ear -
Scrimgoeur
Gregorovitch
Bathilda Bagshot
Ted Tonks & travelling companion
- Hermione tortured -
Wormtail
Dobby
Crabbe
Fred
Lavender Brown?
Snape
Remus Lupin
Tonks
Colin Creevey
Voldemort
To let the dead blur together into nothing but a sense of death itself, especially for such rich characters as existed in your series, was a tragedy compounded of other tragedies.
This was a loss. Let us not let ourselves forget that.
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