Hermione's Helping Hand

I’m on vacation and was inspired to re-read the Harry Potter series. This seemed like an appropriate time given that today, July 31, is Harry Potter’s birthday. Also, in a recent family conversation about the re-telling of fairy tales, we mused about the different experiences you might have with an “updated” fairy tale, or one that takes a different perspective from an original source, depending on whether you had read the original version. I remember back in 2001 talking to a friend who had watched the first Harry Potter movie in the cinema, but who had not read the books beforehand. Being from a different country, he had also not been exposed to the Western canon of fairy tales. He enjoyed the movie, but found it a bit disjointed, and was confused what some scenes were about.

 

So, I wondered what it would feel like to re-read the books with some of these thoughts in mind. I have to admit that the first book is not as good as I remembered. That being said, every fresh re-reading rewires how one thinks about the text so perhaps all this is not surprising. I found the text clunky in some parts, possibly because I have not read any fiction catering to eleven-year olds in a while. Another thing I noticed this time around is how much guiding the author uses to set up a future scene. Is it a helping hand for younger readers? I don’t know.

 

My reading is also coloured by my profession as an educator. I’m constantly noticing what may be “teachable moments”. This time around, Hermione’s nagging, her drawing up study schedules for Harry and Ron, her checking of their work, made me wonder if students today need more Hermiones. It may not seem cool, but having a friend and peer want you to do well academically and makes the effort to help, even when it seems like being a nag, might be a good thing. That sort of helping hand might not be welcome, but in this case, Ron and Harry greatly benefit from it. Once Harry gets on the Quidditch team and his timetable gets tight, it’s Hermione’s strategies that gets him through the end of the year and final exams.

 

The title of today’s post comes from Book 6. In that instance, the beneficiary is Ron, but the help is particularly un-Hermione-esque. And throughout the books, the influence runs both ways. I’d like to think that Ron and Harry learn good study habits with Hermione’s help, but this aspect isn’t emphasized. If Hermione wasn’t there to nag them, would Ron and Harry be diligent in their classes? Rather when Hermione decides to stray from her straight-laced approach and become more “rebellious”, this is what’s celebrated. I’m not sure what the lesson is here. (For example, I previously blogged about Hermione organizing an illegal study group.)

 

Finally, an observation made by my sister after she had read the books has stuck with me. One of Hermione’s roles is to help provide information to the reader. In the first book, Hermione does so by quoting books she has read such as Hogwarts, A History. This keeps the story moving along without being bogged down. Need a factoid to keep things going? The Hermione character provides a way to insert knowledge. Other characters in the book also do this, but none as much as Hermione. Her helping hand is integral to the books!

On Not Reading

To read or not to read. That is the question. Even if you don’t read a book, in no way does it prevent you from talking about it. Or if you feel obligated to skim, ten minutes might be enough. It might even be preferable for you not to read if you are a book critic. This advice sounds positively blasphemous if you love reading and talking about books. But it does come packaged in a witty and humorous book by Pierre Bayard, aptly titled How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

 

I’ve written about many books on this blog. I assure you I’ve read all of them. I even read most of Bayard’s but I did skip a few chapters and skimmed others. I think the author would be proud of me. On the one hand, the book made me think that literary criticism is an absolutely vacuous activity. On the other hand, Bayard emphasizes the non-static nature of a book. Read or not, it provides a jumping point to talk about opinions, ideas, musings, speculations, and engage in other human-like activities. It seems apt that books, read or unread, can promote the idealism of the humanities. Or it might just be a load of rubbish.

 

Ideas are two-faced. Janus-like. That was my biggest takeaway from Bayard’s musings. Two people can have completely different ideas when encountering some reading material, especially if they differ greatly in their backgrounds. There’s a most amusing chapter cherry-picking conversations that an anthropologist has with the Tiv tribe in Africa where she tries to tell them (or perhaps sell them) on the universal human tale of Hamlet. The Tiv may disagree with the typical literature interpretations you might encounter in a college classroom but they interact with the story nevertheless as they ridicule its tropes. I have never read Hamlet although I know enough of the story to quote from it.

 

The other interesting idea comes in the very first chapter with quotes from a book that I hadn’t heard of, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. In it, there is a most peculiar librarian who pointedly never reads any book in the library other the table of contents so that the book can be situated with other books it is related to. An exasperated patron wants to know why. The librarian says that were he to read the actual book, he might “lose perspective”. That sounds preposterous but it turns out the librarian in fact loves all books, so much so, that “incites him to remain prudently on their periphery, for fear that too pronounced an interest in one of them might cause him to neglect the others.” By taking a step back and having a more expansive view, it is the dynamic relationship between books that is more important than one book’s particular content. It’s holistic knowledge by taking preservation of the whole to the extreme.

 

Most books have not been read by most people. And if you do read a book, you begin to forget the moment you start reading. I find this to be more and more true as I’ve aged. I retain the gist of books, stories, TV shows, movies, but I’ve forgotten the details. If enough time has passed, I can’t even tell you the gist. I could consult my blog to reacquaint myself with what I thought of it back when I read it the first time, but a second reading might induce a different response. I’m a different person now than when I first read the book and may interact with it differently as my constellation of ideas has shifted over time. But I don’t think I will ever be like Musil’s librarian. I love the pleasure of reading a book even if it means I miss out on others. Or even re-reading. Since skimming Bayard’s book, I have a hankering to re-read the Harry Potter series. Fresh eyes might provide more fodder for my blog!

In Search of Nothing

Nature abhors a vacuum. At least on the surface of Planet Earth which supports a gaseous atmosphere at a pressure of 760 mm Hg. How did we know this number? One of Galileo’s students, Torricelli, turned a tube of mercury upside down into a bowl of mercury. As long as the tube is more than 760mm long, there will be a gap of nothing at the top. It’s not an air gap. It’s a gap of Nothing.

 

Toricelli was actually looking for the mystical aether, the sacred material breathed by the gods, the fifth element, the quintessence. Supposedly it “allowed light from the stars to propagate” and was “also holding planets in their orbits”. I’m learning about this history reading through Mark Miodownik’s It’s a Gas. Toricelli had finally isolated the aether, a quest of the alchemists, some of whom thought it associated with the philosopher’s stone that would balance the four humours and cure all illnesses. Perhaps it could even prevent death. No wonder that Voldemort coveted it.

 

The trick to creating vacuum is to pump out all the air molecules from a closed container. That container must be truly air-tight. No leaks! Miodownik writes: “We take the accuracy and intricacy of screws, gaskets and valves for granted today. In the seventeenth century such precision engineering was just beginning.” What shot vacuum to fame was the famous demonstration at Magdeburg by Otto von Guericke. He didn’t use the chemical techniques of the alchemists. He just used mechanics to make an airtight pump. Once the air was pumped out of two hemispheres cupped into a sphere not held together by any other means, two teams of eight horses each could not pull the hemispheres apart.

 

What are the properties of Nothing? Now that scientists could reliably make it. They could start running tests. No living thing survived. (Oxygen was yet to be discovered.) Sound does not travel through vacuum, although light does, and magnetism is unaffected. Turns out that metal wires will glow hot in an enclosed vacuum tube when a voltage is applied, and  Voila! Electric lighting is invented! Even if the wire breaks, you can sometimes get electricity to flow. (Electrons leap across but they didn’t know that yet!) This led to vacuum tubes. And now you have TV. Once you’ve mastered manufacturing silicon chips in vacuum conditions, you now have computers and all manner of smart devices. Who would have anticipated that Nothing would be so important!

 

Miodownik also relates the now-familiar story of the discovery of the noble or inert gases. They upended Mendeleev’s Periodic Table. It took painstaking evidence to show that they existed. They weren’t just Nothing even though they seemed to have no chemical reactivity. How were the noble gases discovered? Rayleigh was unhappy with the imperfections of the masses of the chemical elements. They almost followed a beautiful mathematical pattern, but not quite, and so he decided to measure their masses again with high precision. This is much harder than it sounds. You needed to create a vacuum in a flask and weigh it, then pipe the gas in and weigh it again. But the pressure, temperature, and humidity of the room can affect this measurement. You needed to more than triple-check everything. Most scientists didn’t believe Rayleigh, even after Ramsay provided an independent confirmation. Eventually argon was joined by helium, neon, krypton and radon. Chemistry’s 1904 Nobel Prize went to Ramsay for his discoveries. And eventually scientists and engineers found uses for all these gases that at first glance did Nothing!