transformed vision

In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

~ C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, p. 141.

That is the imaginative power of literature and what I’m arguing for in Harry Potter & Imagination.  Like when the protagonist in MacDonald’s Phantastes enters stories that he reads in Fairyland so profoundly that he becomes the character, we learn to see differently, to see through different eyes, yet still our own, with the Coleridgean “transformed vision” (for more on that, listen to Hog’s Head PubCast #60, and read John Granger’s The Deathly Hallows Lectures).  We are Harry at King’s Cross, who no longer needs glasses.

Tolerance is the new fundamentalism.  [click to continue…]