Mirror, Mirror

Within J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, the chapter entitled: “Mirror of Erised” describes the exact outcome of prolonged TV usage that Wallace warns about in E Unibus Pluram. Harry, stumbling upon a mirror in a dusty classroom, notices an inscription that translates to: I show not your face but your heart’s desire. He sees his dead parents come back alive alongside him in the mirror. He gets as close as he can to the mirror, jumping into it if he could. He feels both joy and a terrible sadness. The mirror offers him something he has never had as an orphan, but it all disappears once he looks away. Knowing this object exists, Harry loses all ambition for his original objective in the story.

Harry naively believes the mirror is one that shows family to everyone. Dumbledore, the wise headmaster, claims the Mirror shows only our deepest and most desperate desires and tells Harry that “it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live” (Rowling, pp. 229). The mirror does not offer knowledge or truth or reasons for life. So men waste away in-front of the mirror, staring into the reflection. It’s implied that Dumbledore himself is not truthful with what he sees, suggesting that our deepest desires expose a weakness within ourselves.

In the context of a children’s book, this philosophy could be seen as trite. The key distinction to be made is that the mirror in Harry Potter looks like a work of fiction, while the TV in our living rooms seems natural and our usage unquestioned. Given this story, surely the technology nor the companies are fully to blame for the allure of the experience, entertainment, and dreams. We are capable of imagining worlds where such objects exist and through popular culture we agree that they would be generally bad for us.