Harry Potter is fast-approaching, sending most warm-blooded humans (Muggles?) into a tizzy. I’ve been getting texts, emails, Facebook messages, tweets all planning on seeing the movie opening night, or a week after, or 2 weeks after, post-watching all the other movies in the series again (of course). Something big is about to be over, and seems like everyone wants a piece.
For some of these people, this epic tale of good and bad and honor and nobility held a magical mirror (like the one where Harry Potter sees his parents, and everyone else sees what they most desire) up to our lives, and made us look past the banal, into the meaning of things. Once, in my Novels: Now and Then class at art school, our teacher asked us all if we wanted to have epic lives. The silence seemed to stretch on forever, but the answer was loud in everyone’s expression, and that answer was YES!
For people who are bored with their lives, they dream of the epic, and the rest who are inundated with ridiculousness, they dream of sharing their own epic tale. The defintion of epic is to surpass the ordinary, and most individual lives are far from ordinary. From Gilgamesh to Harry Potter: the epic serves as an escape, a remembrance of old ideals, of something being much bigger than us and it holds us completely in thrall to the story.
Next epic topic: Game of Thrones… the books are keeping me up at night… in a good way, a very good way.
