When you’re doing any kind of serious work, one of the most hazardous distractions you have to figure out how to ignore is the interference field of hope and anxiety associated with the results of that work, its imaginary payoff. If you’re a writer, you hang all kinds of adolescent hopes on the release of your book: that it will prove you to be a serious person, retroactively validate all those years of what might’ve looked to uninformed observers like indolence and drink. Your enemies will gnash their teeth, your exes will all be sorry and at last the long-awaited literary groupies will flock. You’ll see someone on the subway reading your book, and your real life will finally begin. But now that that long-anticipated day is almost here, after all that work and longing and postponed reward, I find myself unexpectedly missing the hard part, the boring part, the long slog to get here. Sitting at my laptop listening to music on headphones and watching steam from a vent unfurling outside the window in the darkening winter afternoons, forcing myself to write for just 40 more minutes, may have been as good as it’s ever going to get.

The summit is an indispensable goal for a mountain climber, but reaching it isn’t the point; what he loves is climbing. For a long time I imagined that the time after I’d finally finished this book would be a kind of indolent, well-deserved afterlife. It’s hard to accept that the part you had to make it through to get where you thought you wanted to be was where you wanted to be all along. The part you hated was your favorite part.

“These are the most important, seminal texts for an entire generation of readers. In 100, 200 years’ time, when scholars want to understand the early 21st century, when they want to understand the ethos and culture of the generation that’s just breaking into adulthood, it’s a safe bet that they’ll be looking at [these] novels. As literary critics, as academics, why on Earth wouldn’t we want to come to grips with these texts? There’s so much here to talk about, culturally and critically, that a two-day conference really can only get the conversation started. People will be reading and writing and studying [these books] for years to come.”

The speaker is a doctoral candidate in the University of St. Andrews English department. What is he talking about?

Harry Potter.

…

via Weldon Owen