Work Text:
[..] It had not been grevious to grow accustomed to the sounds concealed beneath the veil of the Forbidden Forest: the distant trampling of centaurs occupied with their ancient business, the murmuring of hidden birds, the secret crawling of roots beneath the sole of a shoe, like the faintest fingers and palms, outstretched through an endless world.
And yes, the hateful midges never ceased their warlike drone near the puddles, and the webs of spiders were transparent snares, unless the sun in mercy did cast its slanted gleam and bathe the path; and naught could vex more than failing to find what one sought. Yet by now he knew the hollows and secret dwellings of the shyest plants. From the sweetest wild fennel to the disdainful belladonna, it seemed unto his mind, beyond mere knowledge, beyond the familiar, a kind of communion with the first stirrings of creation itself, as though one had grasped the shadow of a word for a spell, that childish intuition prior to any form of instruction, which he had once lived before coming to Hogwarts.
Oft-times, when he had reached the herb he sought, and struck it from the list on the parchment with a precise stroke of ink, he sighed. How could he teach the whole art of potion-brewing, of venefyce, of leechdom and wortcunning as they were called in the older tomes, those lessons he tried to fit as decently as possible into a few months’ curriculum, to those ranks of fledging witches and wizards?
He had desired the Chair of Defense Against the Dark Arts only so that he might keep potions as his secret. If once it had been a desire to escape from a subject that had always come easily to him, it had now become set in his discontented universal order, and he had discovered that he loathed the very duty of sharing.
For how could one share the dampness of the wood, itself a natural cauldron, where the components of the craft lie hidden and are born according to primal formulae, veiled within the order of things? How to share the black, pliable soil, fragrant with rotting life, the triumph of death until its transmutation into life? The hidden alchemy of sap, the recognition of a leaf’s palm? How to share the pride in the shadow of one’s own mind’s heart, when one recalls the exact measures to procure dire benefits to an enemy—two, three drachms of hemlock, he smiled to himself. How oft had he thought, in his youth, of serving his father that terrible infusion, and behold him convulse in violent throes within minutes, observing with cold science his mouth labouring frenetically until his tongue was nothing but shreds soaked in blood!—yet in the end he had never done it.
How should one share the solitude of the supernatural trance of preparation, the muffled pounding in the stone mortar, that shiver dictated by the science exact of measure, governed by the mystery of the ingredient, which determined absolute being or non-being, like a god meteth water and clay to create man; the divine symbolic, and therefore real, essence of every color and gesture and waiting time, that to create—even death, even a poison, even a simple tonic—was the essence of magic itself, which was generation—the noblest art?
Soon he understood that he did not even dislike teaching; what he disliked, in truth, was the thought of teaching as though to some chance person.
[...] Creating spells was neither easy nor difficult; it was simply the fruit of doing, like all things are. Is not a poet made poet by the mere fact of writing verse? And a wizard is a wizard for the very fact of working magic.
He had read, when he was small and alone, that in antiquity wizards sang, and in the place of wands, needless unto the most gifted—they used harps to accompany themselves. Taliesin and Merlin and Morgana belonged to that past so strange and mist-wreathed, when all men everywhere knew that magic existed. He often had wandered through empires of thought, and the fantasy of being known by Muggles and besought for spells and enchantments filled him with pride and dread. To be the best among many was no ill fate, but to be one among many was more comfortable. He longed for a hidden exceptionality, like that of geniuses. Every genius is discovered naturally, because it is manifest. Publicity disgusted him.
He still remembered when he had devoured the whole of Advanced Charms Casting, between a July morning and a late August evening in Cokeworth, among the stifling heat and trunks blackened by smoke. In the introduction, which even then Flitwick ignored, rushing to practice and cramming as many charms as possible into the students, it did expound the technique of visualization and intent. Only then, after years carrying it in his pocket, had he understood the reason for the wand. It irked him that wizards, himself alike, had been tamed by the simplicity of the instrument, but he was secretly grateful for the awareness of not yet being worthy of exceptionality, and that he could still devote himself to learning, wasting time, delaying greatness, feigning humility.
Creating a spell was entirely a matter of will. To make something real, thou must will it, and to will it, thou must think it, clear and vivid. At that age, it had not been difficult to imagine James Potter bloodless, the words for his Sectumsempra, scribbled in haste at the swift-footed call of inspiration, came for the spell like shoots from the tangled deep of his brain, like a hidden muse dwelling in the folds of his mind [...]"
From the journal:
Perillous musings on smoking a cigarette (a proscribed desire under the strictures of the school).
From the journal:
Preparation of a Philter for Dreams: to interrupt the night-visions of unreachable persons, of impossible scenes of deliverance, of grievous youthful errours, of dreadfull companies, and of childish spectres, both kindly and malitious.
It is possible to prepare a potion for gentle slumber, whose vertue is greater even than that of the pillow, or the rosary, or an enchantment for dreams. A receipte well-known employeth four herbes, prepared as a tisane: make an infusion with xii fresh leaves of the Black Poplar, and a handful of Scutellaria, Roman Wormwood, and the Leaves and Flowers of Chamomile (a handful of each). These are to be steeped in a vessel close-cover’d with sufficient water, for the space of xx minutes, and then drunk from a single cup duly measur’d...