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2001-02-14

Sunday night I stood at the crossroads.

I'd finished reading Gandhi's autobiography earlier in the evening, and needed something else to read at bedtime. Filled with a wish to begin practicing non-violence in every aspect of my life, and overwhelmed by the unlikelihood, given my temperament, of my ever being able to do so in any aspect of my life with any regularity, I decided to start with the situation closest at hand.

My mother had left us with an enormous pile of good new murder mysteries. These I will normally read in spates�six, seven in a row, several times a year�before slipping back to bloody corpse-less novels, or travel, or history. So on Sunday, acting in the spirit of Gandhiji, instead of picking up a murder mystery with which to read myself to sleep, I began the volume which my sister had kindly left for me on my bedside shelf�the first volume of the Harry Potter series.

I have resisted Harry Potter books ever since last year when I was first disturbed by the sight of a woman reading one while taking a smoking break outside a Fifth Avenue shop. My incomprehension of their appeal for this woman and other adults lingers as I approach the halfway point of volume one, although I do intend to finish it. In fact, I may wrap this up early and go finish it now�but I have more to say about this phenomenon. Here I'll only add (and my readership is so far down it's almost more a note to self than anything) that if you want non-violence, read Tolstoy.

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