Whenever we step out of domestic life in search of felicity, we come back again disappointed, tired, and chagrined. One day passed under our own roof, with our family, is worth a thousand in another place.
— Orrery. (John Boyle.)
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
— Louis de Bernieres.
Alchymia est ars sine arte
cuius scire est part cum parte
medium est strenue mentiri
finis mendicatum iri.
— Unknown.
Everything I have is electric. It makes no sounds in the real world.
— Laurie Anderson.
#
Westward Ho! (5: Romance And The Stone).
The Tutor was sitting on the floor and feeding Harry Potter his third scone (panacæa was better than butter) when a woman came hurrying down the stairs. The details of her appearance filed themselves with the appropriate departments of the Tutor's mind [very sensible shoes, low heels, +1] but the press ID on a lanyard got particular attention.
She held it out when she saw him looking at it. "Pear Flamel," she said, "Bideford & Littleham Weekly Observer and Monthly Magazette. School board and council meets a specialty."
"And the young gentleman too polite to speak with his mouth full is Harry Potter," said Nicolas Flamel. "At least I think he's polite, these dates are a bit gummy. Do you mind if she pries into your private life, Harry? She's a professional nosey parker."
"Journalist, thank you, Nicolas. And a whole lot more."
"She's got more boxes of notes than I do," said Nicolas Flamel. "A Muggleborn's Directory To The Wizarding World, The Muggle-to-Wizard Translating Dictionary, The Intelligent Muggle's Guide To Magic. Fingers crossed they see print, though some of them will take a sea change."
"Where do I fit in?" said the Tutor.
"You've got your own box," said Pear, twirling the lanyard around her finger. "You're the most interesting boy in the world, you know."
"Oh," said the Tutor, and gave it a sort of distant angst.
"Sad but true," she said. "I expect to get a whole chapter out of your scar alone. The mark of a singular destiny as yet unfulfilled, or just a candidate for laser treatment?"
{ Laser treatment? }
"Won't work," said Flamel mildly, stirring a galaxy into his tea and then dunking a scone in it. "Can't work. Curse scar."
"Mind if I have a look at it?" she said, and took a magnifying glass from her jumper pocket.
The Tutor shrugged. "If you like. What's a curse scar?"
Pear leaned over and examined at the Potter scalp, moving the hair aside for better exposure. [Very clinical examination, journalist now but Nicolas is probably not the only doctor in the room.] "Magically speaking, it's a mark on your very existence. Interesting...certainly lightning-ish, a bit snakey. Does it act up during thunderstorms?"
"I never noticed," reported the Tutor."Curse scar, doesn't sound good, can I get rid of it?"
She let go of the hair. "You might not even want to be rid of it if you could. Strictly it's ambiguous, right down to the Latin root of the word curse — call on divinity to send injury upon someone and you may not get the results you intend. It's why curses and blessings are intertwined."
The Tutor said, "You know, I used to like this scar, but I'm feeling a bit down on it now. Tell me more about these lasers."
Flamel washed down his scone with the last of his tea and said, "They won't help — it's not just a mass of teratokeloid tissue. As Pear said, it's a mark on your existence. There's no getting rid of it. Remove your scalp and it'll happily grace your bare skull.
"Although — have you considered a career in Extreme Quidditch...?"
{ Ack! }
"Nicolas..."
"Just a thought, Pear. But no, Harry, there aren't many removal options — I mean, two minutes outpatient at St Mungo's if a repentant Voldemort popped up and retracted the actual curse, but other than that...mmm, well, there's a probably-mythical wand that might be powerful enough to remove it — and lightning, probably."
"Lightning," said the Tutor.
"Well, obviously the tricky part is keeping the rest of your head on," said Flamel, picking up another scone. "But it's amazing stuff, lightning. Last month's Quibbler had a story out of America that said Merlin used lightning to pluck a muggle out of the future. Had to send him back the long way, bit embarrassing."
"Don't eat all the scones, Nicolas."
"Can we come back to the destiny part?" said the Tutor, grabbing the last two scones and sticking them in his pocket and then taking them out again because full pocket. "It sounds so much better than curse. Also, does anyone want a late peach?"
"Ta," said Nicolas Flamel, and took one of the peaches. "Love a peach," he said, tossing it in the air and catching it. "I've been working on my cobblers."
"Nicolas..."
"What?" said Flamel. He set the peach on top of volume D of the Anglo-American Cyclopædia of Magic. "Oh. Destiny. Destiny. Fun fact, Pear, it seems that Albus has in fact seen fit to share the whole prophecy with Harry here." While he said this he extracted the copied page from inside the Cyclopedia.
"Has he, now," said Pear. "That's good."
"Along with my Sylvia Eventi first edition, which he swore he'd return just as soon as he found it."
"The scamp!"
"But Harry sought us out on his own. Well, me. Read this, would you, Pear?" said Flamel, and handed her the page. "Two point type is beyond me."
"So you know about the prophecy," said the Tutor at the first edgewise opportunity.
"Y...es," said Flamel. "I should begin at the beginning, shouldn't I, Pear?"
"Always a good idea if you happen to know where the story starts," said Pear, reading the page with her magnifying glass (and glasses). "Why are we in this book, Nicolas? And for that matter, how do they know our birthdays? I don't know our birthdays, it was the fourteenth century."
"An interesting pair of questions. As yet I haven't the faintest."
"Noted alchemist and opera lover?" said Pear. "That's an interestingly specific detail."
"I thought it might be a pun," said the Tutor.
"On Magnum Opus?" said Pear, handing back the paper. "Plausible."
"I do like a good opera," said Flamel, pulling a scone out of his sleeve. "Gilbert and Sullivan..."
"Puccini?" said the Tutor.
"Oh, no," said Flamel, "Too commercial. Opera lover—Der Stein der Weisen! remember, Pear?"
"How could I forget?" she said.
"Forget what?" said the Tutor.
"That was the opera that gave Albus Dumbledore the clue to finding us," said Pear. "We reviewed the première. Vienna, 1790."
"The hot new musical with three numbers by Mozart," said Flamel. "Thumbs down, not enough Philosopher's Stone in, considering it was in the title. Wolfie had some stuff, though..."
The Tutor looked back and forth between the Flamels with expertly fabricated mute incomprehension.
"In 1790," explained Pear, "I was music critic for — the Spectacle or the Spectrum or something, one of the fortnightlies. And we signed the review jointly, as Ellen and Colin Flame-Laspere. And young Albus worked out the anagram while reading back issues in the Hogwarts library. He wasn't looking for us then — he was just a music buff, reading old reviews, but he noticed."
Flamel said, "And remembered. And then guessed, correctly, that I'd be posing as my own grandson a hundred years later with the same name. Pear was Nelle...but I'm getting ahead of myself—
"In the beginning, Harry, and to start with, I was an alchemist. Do you happen to know what the implication of being an alchemist is?"
The Tutor waited a decent interval and said "I think I probably don't...? I mean there's hardly anything about alchemy in the library." Unless it's in the Muggle Studies section, and that doesn't count. "Other than you, the most interesting thing I know about alchemy was the discovery of phosphorus..."
"Mmm, yes, well, it's not all white lab coat wrestling with agèd pee, alchemy — there's also a lot of horse dung involved in various ways — but you've sort of scraped against the salient point. There's nothing to speak of in the Hogwarts library about alchemy because alchemy isn't magic.
"So when I say I was an alchemist I mean I wasn't a wizard."
"You what?" said the Tutor and Harry.
#
Long ago [said Nicolas Flamel] when I was a child of perhaps twice your age, when a hundred miles was a long distance and a hundred years was a long time, I was biffing about in Paris, pursuing the humble yet satisfying life of a young scrivener, getting in a bit of poetry and painting at the weekend, when — Paris being Paris — I unexpectedly found myself one morning with a staggeringly beautiful wife. And since to my further surprise she was actually mine, and since two cannot in fact live as cheaply as one, I took up star-charting for a bit of extra dosh.
I had just arrived at the conclusion that my income was still insufficient to the standard to which I hoped to become accustomed when by sheer fortuitous synchronicity I happened to pick up — from a street vendor or a library book sale or something — a copy of the Philosopher's Stone Technical Reference Manual, a snip at two florins. I held in my largely uncomprehending hand, that brisk spring morning in whatever year it was, forty-two pages of operating instructions for the Philosopher's Stone: how to turn base metals to silver and gold, how to make elixir vitae, how to chart your biorhythms—
["Nicolas..."]
Well, it might as well have done. Alchemy, Harry, is a load of old tosh. Other than leading muggles to chemistry, the only things it's ever produced are colour-blindness, aphasia, temporary insanity and shortness of breath. The only gold any alchemist ever produced was from up his sleeve. Alchemy is the fantasy of people who have neither money nor a life expectancy nor health.
I put twenty-one years into that flimmery-flummery flapdoodle. Not to mention a considerable amount of Pear's family money. Other than meeting some interesting people along the way it was a complete waste of time, accomplished me absolutely nothing — and I gave up on the Philosopher's Stone, in an absolute rage, on 25th April 1382, somewhere around four in the afternoon.
I had just dropped a very expensive alembic, and was suddenly overcome by a combination of disgust and despair and self-hatred and an acute sense of utter failure. All my devices had ever done was turn gold into less gold. I had wasted my life, I had nothing to show for my efforts.
So I grabbed a hammer and went to smash the whole business.
I had every intention of breaking up every last bit of glassware and piping — which would have been a terrible mistake because poisonous, but as it happened, the hammer-head came off on the downswing.
Zip! straight out the window, broke a flowerpot on the way.
And I was standing there, looking down at this useless, ludicrous headless handle, and wondering if the head had landed on anybody, when Pear came into the room to see what was going on, and I turned my head and looked at her and said...
...what did I say, Pear? "I can't even ruin my life properly"? Or maybe "I can't even fail successfully".
["It wasn't what you said, dear, it was the look on your face."]
And the look on her face...it was just...well, it was the key, because the next thing I knew, the hammer handle discharged a bolt of pink lightning into the equipment.
Et voilà! Instant Philosopher's Stone.
#
The Tutor, no less nonplussed than Harry, looked up at Nicolas Flamel, who shrugged and swept some crumbs out of his beard.
"You'd think," said Nicolas Flamel, "that creating the Magnum Opus would boil down to more than one's better half getting the same expression on her face as when you wash your white pants with the red blanket again, but there you are."
"You look sweet in pink pants, dear," said Pear, and crinkled her nose.
"That's it — that's the look," said Flamel. "Six hundred years and it hasn't changed. Turns the heart to marshmallow...
"Well, anyway, as you probably guessed, Harry, at the age of fortysomething I'd just let off a whacking great blast of what in France they call infantile magic."
"The most powerful kind," interjected Pear. "Silent."
"Over here they call it accidental magic," Flamel elaborated. "I think on the other side of the pond they call it unconscious, which makes more sense because outcome-as-intended, but whatever the word is, I set records for both magnitude and lateness of onset, and tripped every alarm at Beauxbatons — because Pear had seen it, you see — and it wasn't more than seven minutes before the headmistress of Beauxbatons showed up with half the staff."
Perception, thought the Tutor. If you do magic but no one perceives it — maybe that's why Hermione got busted only once. If you lumos to read under the covers, who will know?
"And the rest," said Flamel, waving a hand, "is biography. I got an abbreviated basic education in magic at Beauxbatons, and then Pear and I decided to go see the elephant.
"We went full circle around the world, and by the time we got home...well, home was no longer there, and someone had disassembled our house in search of alchemical secrets besides, so we kept going, and right now we're here...and for some people, quite hard to find. Because, you see, one reason we left France was the sheer number of people who wanted help I couldn't provide. And they followed on after me. Constantly seeking me out.
"And I thought, well, why not magic up a solution? And after a bottle of not very good wine I did: I blocked myself off from being found by anybody who needed the Philosopher's Stone. Wizards and muggles alike. Had I been sober, I'd have blocked only muggles, because wizards don't care."
"They don't?"
"Why would they?" said Flamel. "To the wizard, the Philosopher's Stone is redundant. Wizarddom fought a lot of goblin wars just to get them to agree to secure wizarding currency. Any sufficiently puissant wizard can transfigure metals, you don't need a Philosopher's Stone to do that — it makes the wrong kind of gold anyway — but there's never been a wizard who can duplicate goblin magic.
"The elixir of life, wizards don't care about that either. You know what wizards die of?"
"No?"
"Neither do wizards. I exaggerate only slightly. There's no known upper limit on a wizard's age. We age to the point of white-haired wrinkled respectability, become éminences grise et blanc, but we don't fall to bits. And there are things you can do about the hair and wrinkles, too.
"What kills wizards, Harry, other than other wizards, is social entropy. —Too many syllables? Cultural sublation."
"That's more syllables, Nicolas..."
"What I mean to say," said Flamel, "is that a new world is constantly rising up from under the old and the old one crumbles away like eggshell. And it gets very lonely, being an exile from your own country—which is the past, in this case." He twirled his hammer-handle wand between his fingers. "The heart beats more slowly in the wizarding world, and traditions and institutions and isolation hold things in place against the current so that change flows like syrup rather than water —"
"Mind your metaphors, dear."
"— but eventually wizards go to sleep and don't bother to wake simply because the world they knew doesn't exist any more and they can't fit the new one. Some of them anticipate a fresh start with a blank slate, others just give up.
"It was muggles who thought up the Stone of the Philosophers, to live forever, but it was old wizards who first dreamed of time travel, to go back to when things didn't seem broken.
"And that," said Flamel, "is where the panacæa comes in. It provides perfect equanimity. Pear and I went to see the new bridge at Pontypridd —" He pointed at a framed picture on the opposite wall — "and when we went back after the invention of photography, it was the Old Bridge with a new one next to it. We laughed, but we're basically the only ones who can. That's the only facet of the Stone that wizards have much interest in, the panacæa — like Paracelsus. We went to his wake, remember, Pear?"
"I remember," said Pear.
"Good old Phil...well, as I say, not much interest in finding the Stone, wizard-wise — a few people in Egypt, but Lǎoyé Shān University, they're only real alchemical research establishment. We stopped by there — they said I achieved the lian-wai-tan. Earthly immortality, as opposed to the lian-nui-tan, which allows one to ascend to the heavens."
"Wizards in space?" said the Tutor.
"Yes. Which, obviously, is why they get actual grants...shame they had to restart their whole research program after 40,000 years. Well, relatively speaking."
"—How long?"
"Well, there's this notion that mercury can be permuted into gold over a period of 80,000 years, you see, and they were working in coöperation with their temporal magic department. But then of course that thing happened back in September."
"Thing?"
"Quite the panic at the Department of Mysteries, I understand," said Flamel, looking obliquely amused. "Do the kids still say freakout?"
"I don't think so," said the Tutor, and added a dash of doubt to the voice. "Professor Dumbledore got called in to consult on something at the Department of Mysteries while I was talking to him."
"That's the bunny," said Flamel, nodding.
"And I did hear there was a cloud over the Ministry..." added the Tutor with a bit of doubt.
Flamel snorted. "Cloud's running the ministry. How do you cover up a global phenomenon? Why would you even try? Strange chap, Cornelius Fudge. Time Turners short out from here to Prague — knock-on effects in China, Los Angeles, Kirkus Square — and he says stonewall inquiries."
Ah! Kirkus Square. The third point of the Bloomsbury Triangle, Harry.
"Did you notice anything odd at Hogwarts?" asked Nicolas Flamel. "Timewise?"
"Um," said the Tutor. "No, not really." Unless you count the foggy day.
"Well, keep an eye out, you never know," said Flamel. "I was looking something up in my diary for 1981 the other day, and I would have sworn that the first of November was a Tuesday. I remember writing about how bright a dull grey Tuesday could seem. But the calendar in my diary says no, Halloween 1981 was a Saturday, and now I increasingly remember it being a bright and shiny Sunday — when we went over and visited the Temple de l'Amour, remember, Pear?"
"On Île de la Jatte?" said Pear. "Definitely a Sunday."
"That's really weird," said the Tutor.
"Isn't it, though? Well, these things happen, no point belabouring a side issue."
The Tutor raised a hand. "Speaking of side issues, you can exchange Muggle currency for wizard money, so couldn't a wizard make gold and..."
Pear was shaking her head no. "It's not freely convertible — there's a muggleborn wizard school-supplies exception, a few others."
"But to continue!" said Nicolas Flamel. "You want to hear about the Dumbledore stone."
"The what?" said the Tutor.
Oh. Ho. So that's what was so ostentatiously hidden...
"But hang on a moment," said Flamel, standing up, "does anyone want a butterbeer? I want a butterbeer."
The Tutor raised his hand enthusiastically.
"Incidentally, Nicolas, it's recycling tomorrow," said Pear.
"Oh, is it?"
"How long have we been living here?"
"Er," said Flamel, scratching his head and heading for the kitchen. "91 minus 69...no, wait, when was the Summer of Love?"
"It's perennial, dear," she said as he disappeared through the door.
#
The Tutor looked up at Pear Flamel, and Pear Flamel looked down at the Tutor, or rather at the Scar.
"...Destiny?" said the Tutor. "How destiny? Why destiny?"
"It's the prophecy," she said, and sat down on the arm of the couch. "It says the dark lord will mark the one with the power to vanquish him as his equal.
"Which, you know, means equal. Not equal and opposite, not the versa to his vice, not the plus to his minus, not the one who can X him out, but his equal.
"And when he actually did it—" she pointed at the Scar — "he disintegrated.
"Which could have been a coincidence, but it's a...portent-laden mystery, don't you think?"
And she smiled.
For observe, the terminating K or G is the only difference (and that little enough) between Think and Thing. Is not that circumstance worth some consideration here? Perhaps you will find that the common vulgar pronunciation of Nothink, instead of Nothing, is not so very absurd as our contrary fashion makes it appear.
— John Horne Tooke.
Res=thou art thinking. —Even so our "Thing": id est, thinking or think'd. Think, Thank, Tank = Reservoir of what has been thinged — Denken, Danken — I forget the German for Tank...
— Coleridge.
The unitary fourfold of the sky and earth, mortals and divinities, which is stayed in the thinging of the things, we call — the world. ... Thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture — gestate — world.
— Heidegger.
The purpose of the collector of art is to construct a self-renewing mosaic puzzle, the unending solution of which provides a feeling of progress — as voids are filled with lovely things — and renewed purpose — as these things create new conceptual spaces around them. The ideal collection is always complete yet never finished...
Normally to collect is to deny: what I have, you do not. A truly private collection, reductio ad absurdum, would disappear into itself, taking its curator with it, and cease to exist despite being forever preserved. Denial being contrary to the very purpose of art, I therefore made my collection public from the beginning, filling the public spaces of a school with curiosities and creating intriguing gaps for mindful students to fill simply by witnessing. The more you see in the spaces between, the more there is to see, and thus do static objêts d'art become active and bountiful, which is to say alive.
— Glenella Rossitor. [Curator's preface to HOGWARTS: A HISTORICAL SUPPLEMENT by Amicitia E. Mannis.]
