Fantasy Advent Day 21: Harry Potter Lessons Learned, Chapter 15: The Forbidden Forest

Welcome back to the Fantasy Advent and Chapter 15 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. This chapter is ominous or portentous. We foresee difficulties and could use a bit of divine... All right, I'm out of fortune-telling jokes. Mars is bright tonight and all of Hogwarts gets a little more unpleasant, but there is much to learn in this chapter.

The common enemy

The chapter starts with one of the most relatable calamities of the first Harry Potter book. Harry and Hermione get in over their heads with a teacher and they have unintended consequences. We can't help but smirk that Malfoy got in trouble for breaking a rule, but poor Neville was trying to do the right thing in the wrong circumstances and that is exactly the plight of the Gryffindors in the last chapter. Harry becomes so disliked that his Quidditch team won't even call him by his name. Hermione stops answering questions in class.

It strikes me hard that Harry "could hear Neville sobbing into his pillow for what seemed like hours." We can sympathize with him not knowing what to say, but I wonder what the other boys in the dorm thought. Was Neville so often in distress that they just let him cry it out? Did they not want to get involved in whatever was causing him to melt down that night? I also wonder what it was like in Hermione's dorm over this period of time.

The foray into the Forbidden Forest is oddly a good example of banding together. Centaurs put aside their mistrust of humans. Some students try to help each other in spite of prejudices. It's true that, other than Firenze, the centaurs just keep pointing out the omen of Mars, the bringer of war, being bright in the sky.

There is a lot of danger and discouragement in this chapter whether it's the centaurs censoring Firenze's help of the humans or Ron interrupting Harry every time he says Voldemort. We see Voldemort at work in ways that haven't happened since the first wizarding war. But we see that people are prepared to stand against him, even now.

Lesson Learned: Fear in community

All of us have times in our lives when it's hard to find light in the darkness. There's nothing wrong with that; it's part of the human experience. But we should always look for ways to ask for help from others.

And when we're not the ones wandering in darkness, we ought to look for ways to help those who aren't as lucky. A problem shared can be less of a problem and we will be seeing a lot of this in the chapters to come.