Harry Potter

Last night was the release of the penultimate movie in the Harry Potter series, so SGA helped to sponsor a Harry Potter themed dinner in the caf. As I sat at the long rows of tables with floating candles, faculty sitting in their robes at the front, the high vaulted ceilings and the enormous windows, all reminiscent of the dining hall in Harry Potter, I thought about how we relate our campus to Hogwarts. You can almost always hear someone referring to how our campus in some way is like Hogwarts, whether it is our buldings, faculty in robes, or whatever else, everyone has made the connection at some point. We romanticize Holland Hall as a bulding straight of the wonderful wizarding realm and the library may also be drawn in to this comparison. It is interesting how we relate our landscapes to our fantasies, something we have seen in a mive or read in a book. Obviously the arhictects of St. Olaf were not thinking Hogwarts when they built the buildings (in fact most buildings were done before Harry Potter even came out in book or movie form), but we still imagine this to be true. We watch a movie and there is a whole world that enchants us visually, but also enchants us through our desire to be like the people in it. For whatever reason we find wizards fascinating and this moves us beyond just a visual enchantment with the films. We do not want St. Olaf to be Hogwarts just becasue Hogwarts is a beautiful castle, we also want it to be Hogwarts becasue this implies we are wizards and withces, we can do magic, we wear robes, there are owls, whatever part beyond architecture strikes your fancy. These parts of campus then stick in our head more, they mean more to us and contribute more to what here is. Though I am not the biggest Harry Potter fan there is and I generally try to avoid the hysteria surrounding it, there is a part of me that wants this all to be true: we really do go to Hogwarts. So in some way that is what here is to me. The landscape invokes images of other places and other times, in this case Harry Potter and the fantasy the not real becomes a part of a real idea