(The passage below is an excerpt from an essay published in the late twentieth century.)

An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It’s a picture dating from 1946 of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born. The house is rather peculiar—a three-storeyed gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tiled hat. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ goes the famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, ‘they do things differently there.’ But the photograph tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.

A few years ago I revisited Bombay,¹ which is my lost city, after an absence of something like half my life. Shortly after arriving, acting on an impulse, I opened the telephone directory and looked for my father’s name. And, amazingly, there it was; his name, our old address, the unchanged telephone number, as if we had never gone away to the unmentionable country across the border. It was an eerie discovery. I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions, and that this continuity was the reality. Then I went to visit the house in the photograph and stood outside it, neither daring nor wishing to announce myself to its new owners. (I didn’t want to see how they’d ruined the interior.) I was overwhelmed. The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my childhood in the same way, monochromatically. The colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the red tiles, the yellow-edged green of cactus-leaves, the brilliance of bougainvillaea creeper. It is probably not too romantic to say that that was when my novel Midnight’s Children was really born; when I realized how much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded greys of old family-album snapshots, but whole, in CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor.

Bombay is a city built by foreigners upon reclaimed land; I, who had been away so long that I almost qualified for the title, was gripped by the conviction that I, too, had a city and a history to reclaim.

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt.² But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

Writing my book in North London, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been, unaffected by the distortions of memory) what I was actually doing was a novel of memory and about memory, so that my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged.

This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.

¹The city of Mumbai, India, was commonly known as Bombay until the mid-1990s.
²an allusion to a biblical story in which Lot’s wife disobeys a divine command against looking back at her city and is punished by being transformed into a pillar of salt

(The following passage is excerpted from an article published in 2011.)

Jo Rowling—she adopted “J.K.” on the publishing truism that women authors did not sell—was born in 1965 and was raised in modest, rural comfort. When Ms. Rowling was 15, her mother was diagnosed with degenerative multiple sclerosis; she died, age 45, in December 1990. On a train to London from Manchester earlier that year, Ms. Rowling conceived a series of novels based on a boy wizard. She briefly went to teach English in Portugal, where she contracted a brief marriage, returning penniless with her child to study in Edinburgh. The sickness and death of the author’s mother are pivotal to her creation.

From the opening page of the first book, the reader engages with Harry’s child’s-eye view of a world ruled by imbeciles and malefactors. Harry Potter is an orphan, alone in a world of mediocrities known as “Muggles,” who do not appreciate his special gifts. Boarding a train to Scotland at platform 9¾ of Kings Cross Station, London, he finds acceptance as a wizard, magically empowered but under mortal threat from mysterious enemies.

Harry is a Dickensian archetype,¹ a child of cruelty who inspires in us an urge to make a better world. Alongside Oliver Twist, he is the most celebrated orphan in world literature. Oliver is altogether too perfect, untouched by the evil around him. Harry, more credibly, wrestles with forces of darkness and commands our sympathies.

Like Dickens, Ms. Rowling gives some of her secondary characters onomatopoeic names, informing us before we read another word what kind of person they are. Just as Scrooge, Mr. Bumble, Magwitch and Fagin reflect negative traits in Dickens’s world, so do Severus Snape, Quirrell and Filch in that of Harry Potter. Ms. Rowling goes beyond Dickens in imprinting evil into a person’s name. Voldemort means flight of death in French, Malfoy is bad faith.

In common with Dickens, Ms. Rowling knows that the reading public will not be insulted by situations that it can recognize. In Hogwarts, she nods to the classic genre of the English school story, established by “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” in 1857. Yet she also draws deep on a well of Nordic mythology, plumbed by J.R.R. Tolkien in “The Lord of the Rings” and by Richard Wagner in his Nibelungen tetralogy.² Hagrid, Hedwig and Hogsmeade could readily appear in any of these epics.

The force of the Harry Potter cycle lies, as with Wagner, not so much in the originality of its subject matter as in the execution of a panoptic³ vision across a great span of time. Dickens, writing week to week, never harbored such grandiose ambition. The closest any other author gets, at this level, to creating and sustaining a fantasy/reality world is Mark Twain in the Tom Sawyer novels, of which four were successfully published during his lifetime.

Tom is supposed to be 11 or 12 years old when the cycle begins, a year or so older than Harry, and Twain employs him as a paradigm of lost American innocence, a nostalgic tweak at his mostly adult readership. Harry represents no other time or place. He is what he is: an English boy who is sent off to boarding school, where, from friends and teachers, he discovers both his own nature as a wizard and the hair-raising hazards that he may face at any time.

It is here that Ms. Rowling achieves the double-whammy of getting child readers to emote with a central character who is outwardly like them, inwardly not, empowered by wizardry yet otherwise ordinary. Tom’s magic is pure mischief, fooling another kid to whitewash his aunt’s fence. Harry’s is existential. He pretends at normality, knowing he can shed it at will to frustrate the forces of evil.

Harry, nevertheless, arouses greater empathy because he seems to be a child liberated from the control of dull, distracted adults, rejecting his soulless environment. No sensitive child would want to grow up to be Harry’s Muggle relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of No. 4 Privet Drive. Harry Potter allows children of the suburbs to loathe their Little Boxes,⁴ to fly a nebulous broom, play non-televisable sports and aspire to a life out of the ordinary. Whether read in Seattle, Sarajevo or Soweto, Harry gives children a license to judge the adult world—and find it wanting.

How Harry Saved Reading by Norman Lebrecht (Copyright © Norman Lebrecht, 2011) Reproduced by permission of A M Heath & Co. Ltd. Authors' Agents

¹Charles Dickens (1812-1870), author of Oliver Twist, often depicted children facing hardships and cruelty.

²A series of nineteenth-century operas loosely based on Norse sagas.

³All-seeing.

⁴The title of a 1962 song describing the sameness of suburban houses.

(This passage is from an essay by a contemporary American writer.)

It is a fact that, to that other, nothing ever happens. I, a mortal woman, move through my life with the excited interest of a swimmer in uncharted waters – my predelictions are few, but intense – while she, the other, is a mere shadow, a blur, a figure glimpsed in the corner of the eye. Rumors of "JCO"* come to me thirdhand and usually unrecognizable, arguing, absurdly, for her historical existence. But while writing exists, writers do not – as all writers know. It's true, I see her photograph – my "likeness" – yet it is rarely the same "likeness" from photograph to photograph, and the expression is usually one of faint bewilderment. "I acknowledge that I share a name and a face with "JCO," this expression suggests, but this is a mere convenience. Please don't be deceived!"

"JCO" is not a person, nor even a personality, but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts. Some of the texts are retained in my (our) memory, but some have bleached out, like pages of print left too long in the sun. Many of the texts have been translated into foreign languages, which is to say into texts at another remove from the primary – sometimes even the author's name, on the dust jacket of one of these texts, is unrecognizable by the author. I, on the contrary, am fated to be "real" – "physical" – "corporeal" – to "exist in Time." I continue to age year by year, if not hour by hour, while "JCO," the other, remains no fixed age – in spiritual essence, perhaps, forever poised between the fever of idealism and the chill of cynicism, a precocious eighteen years old. Yet, can a process be said to have an age? an impulse, a strategy, an obsessive tracery, like planetary orbits to which planets, "real" planets, must conform?

No one wants to believe this obvious truth: the "artist" can inhabit any individual, for the individual is irrelevant to "art." (And what is "art"? A firestorm pushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.) "JCO" occasionally mines, and distorts, my personal history; but only because the history is close at hand, and then only when some idiosyncrasy about it suits her design, or some curious element of the symbolic. If you, a friend of mine, should appear in her work, have no fear – you won't recognize yourself, any more than I would recognize you.

It would be misleading to describe our relationship as hostile in any emotional sense, for she, being bodiless, having no existence, has no emotions: we are more helpfully defined as diamagnetic, the one repulsing the other as magnetic poles repulse each other, so that "JCO" eclipses me, or, and this is less frequent, I eclipse "JCO," depending upon the strength of my will.

If one or the other of us must be sacrificed, it has always been me.

And so my life continues through the decades … not connected in the slightest with that conspicuous other with whom, by accident, I share a name and a likeness. The fact seems self-evident that I was but the door through which she entered – "it" entered – but any door would have done as well. Does it matter which entrance you use to enter a walled garden? Once you're inside and have closed the door?

For once, not she but I am writing these pages. Or so I believe.

*Joyce Carol Oates

(1) Does Mars have liquid water? (2) While the answer may once have been yes—billions of years ago when Mars was warmer and wetter—the hostile conditions on the planet have long since made it apparently uninhabitable.

(3) Those conditions include Mars’s thin atmosphere, which, like its polar ice caps, consists primarily of carbon dioxide, with only traces of oxygen (0.145 percent, compared to Earth’s 21 percent). (4) Moreover, because the atmosphere is so thin, the planet’s bitterly cold surface is exposed to intense solar radiation. (5) Finally, liquid water, one of the requirements for life as we know it, may be virtually nonexistent.

(6) Because of these conditions, life on Mars seems unlikely. (7) But the discovery, in 2014, of manganese oxide in the dust blanketing Mars’s surface has led some NASA scientists to conclude that Mars may harbor life after all. (8) In a recent study, they propose that the large amounts of oxygen needed for manganese oxide to form may actually have come from microorganisms releasing oxygen into the atmosphere over a period of millions of years. (9) Such microorganisms, they argue, could survive in saltwater pools just under the Martian surface. (10) The water in these pools would be liquid and would have more than enough oxygen available to support microbial life forms. (11) Furthermore, because they are under the surface, the pools would be protected from solar radiation.

(12) This extraordinary hypothesis is not without evidentiary support. (13) Analogous environments can be found on Earth, for example, where life abounds in the cold salt waters of sea-ice fissures. (14) And computer models confirm that the conditions hypothesized by the study, if they existed, could indeed support life.

(15) Some scientists point out, for example, that the oxygen that was required for the formation of manganese oxide probably came from the oxygen-rich atmosphere of an ancient Mars, and not from microbes living in salt water near the surface. (16) And it has not been confirmed that there is any liquid water on Mars, either on or just below the surface. (17) Even if scientists do find liquid water someday, they better be darned sure they don’t contaminate it with microorganisms from Earth.

(The following passage is an essay published by a British writer in the 1750s.)

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. The flowers which scatter their odors from time to time in the paths of life, grow up without culture from seeds scattered by chance.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment. Wits and humorists are brought together from distant quarters by preconcerted invitations; they come attended by their admirers prepared to laugh and to applaud: they gaze a while on each other, ashamed to be silent, and afraid to speak; every man is discontented with himself, grows angry with those that give him pain, and resolves that he will contribute nothing to the merriment of such worthless company. Wine inflames the general malignity, and changes sullenness to petulance, till at last none can bear any longer the presence of the rest. They retire to vent their indignation in safer places, where they are heard with attention; their importance is restored, they recover their good humor, and gladden the night with wit and jocularity.

Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed. The most active imagination will be sometimes torpid, under the frigid influence of melancholy, and sometimes occasions will be wanting to tempt the mind, however volatile, to sallies and excursions. Nothing was ever said with uncommon felicity,¹aptness but by the cooperation of chance; and therefore, wit as well as valor must be content to share its honors with fortune.

All other pleasures are equally uncertain; the general remedy of uneasiness is change of place; almost everyone has some journey of pleasure in his mind, with which he flatters his expectation. He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish, and the postilion²person who rides one of the horses drawing a carriage brutal. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious³accommodating or convenient house, but the best is always worse than he expected.

He at last enters his native province, and resolves to feast his mind with the conversation of his old friends, and the recollection of juvenile frolics. He stops at the house of his friend whom he designs to overpower with pleasure by the unexpected interview. He is not known till he tells his name, and revives the memory of himself by a gradual explanation. He is then coldly received, and ceremoniously feasted. He hastes away to another whom his affairs have called to a distant place, and having seen the empty house, goes away disgusted by a disappointment which could not be intended because it could not be foreseen. At the next house he finds every face clouded with misfortune, and is regarded with malevolence as an unreasonable intruder, who comes not to visit but to insult them.

It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. He that has pictured a prospect upon his fancy, will receive little pleasure from his eyes; he that has anticipated the conversation of a wit, will wonder to what prejudice he owes his reputation. Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

¹ aptness
² person who rides one of the horses drawing a carriage
³ accommodating or convenient