Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

think about the Harry Potter series. One of the reasons J. K. Rowling’s books exerted magnetic power over every sentient creature on earth is that they resolved, indeed fused, a cultural contradiction. She took the aesthetic of old-fashioned English boarding-school life and placed it at the center of a narrative about political inclusiveness. You get to keep the scarves, the medieval dining hall, the verdant lawns, the sense of privilege (you’re a wizard, Harry), while not only losing the snobbery and racism but actually casting them as the villains of the series. It’s the Slytherins and Death Eaters who have it in for Mudbloods, not Harry and his friends, Hogwarts’ true heirs. What results is an absolutely bonkers subliminal reconfiguration of basically the entire cultural heritage of England—and thus the backstory of much of the modern world. It’s as if Rowling remakes a thousand-year-old national tradition into something that’s (a) totally unearned but (b) also way better than the original. Of course it electrified people.

I was wasting time at an advanced enough level not to need help from television.

the Internet also created a new type of monoculture: It made every place accessible to every other place. We no longer assume, now, that the peculiarities of our own environments are private.

Here is here. And this is just the opposite of the here-is-everywhere world inhabited by the conspiracy, which is global in scale, utterly connected, and ruled by pseudonymous men whose flat-affect, no-eye-contact meetings were almost the personification of a chat window.

London, late summer, the trees inheriting autumn, the pavement a history-book map tracing a dwindling empire of rain.

This is the order that outlasts one night and the next. That outlasts circumstance. What you feel around you, in this cool air, is not what’s passing or what’s past. It’s what’s perpetual. Sea and stone, the steadiness at the core of things, the solid facts of place and ritual. No need to make a fuss. It is enough, if you trust your role in the order, to hold your gaze steady. Sometimes it is enough in this world to be patient, and do your duty, and bide your time.

How to pay delighted attention to rituals whose tedium could kill a snail.

Waiting performed properly can invest an empty ceremony with meaning.

It is a rare gift, the ability to take any situation and ease it toward the pleasantest outcome, the kindest, the most beautiful; to make it a little more relaxed, a little more memorable.

What we’re watching here, in other words, is not only the end of the West. It’s the West memorializing itself, performing itself in the moment of its own ending. There are real cowboys in New Ponca, but one of the ways to make a living as a cowboy now is to become a “cowboy”—to pretend to do, for a crowd, the thing you actually do. There are Indians still living in traditional ways on tribal lands near town, and the region itself is one of the nation’s great hubs of Native American heritage—mostly for tragic reasons, but still—yet the Indians who play “Indians” for the 101 are arguing with the Millers about their overtime pay. The citizens of the town are living out an authentic drama of frontier settlement; at the same time, silent film studios are already cranking out Westerns, and the citizens know this, and have seen them.