What Harry Potter can Teach us about Aging

The West is not a great culture in which to age. It's been a problem for eons, but it's going to become more pressing in our lifetimes, as the demographic proportion continues to take on the shape of an upside-down pyramid. Most of us are aware of the practical problems posed by an aging world population, including the burden of health care and the economic implications of having more people retired and fewer working to fatten up that social safety net. But underlying all of these is a cultural factor that is very difficult for us to see. We are all of us on some level (and frequently on the surface) afraid of aging. And why shouldn't we fear it? We think of it as an inevitable decline, a second childhood, a mere prelude to death, unless God forbid one dies young. We lack a cultural notion of age as a positive change, to which benefits accrue. It is in fact considered insensitive to call someone old, so that one must resort to euphemisms. No wonder when we talk about healthy or successful aging, we tend to talk about a person who stays young. There is no good aging, only slower aging, aging that does its best to look like anything but age.

Except for Professor Dumbledore.

A quick disclosure: I like the Harry Potter books. I don't have kids of my own to blame it on, I just read them all and liked them, and got sucked into the loserish world of people who discuss them all day long. It got to the point when watching the opening scene of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire I was momentarily appalled to learn you can say "avarda kedavra" in a PG-13 film. But, let me also point out that I am hardly alone. I would venture to guess that most people in the English-speaking world and probably everywhere else too have read at least one of these books. I'm not claiming exceptional quality for the books, but one cannot deny their potential for cultural influence.

And all of this is good news, because one of the most important relationships in the book is between Harry and his great aged teacher, Prof. Dumbledore. By my calculation, Dumbledore is at least in his early to mid 80's if not older during Harry's years at school*. The series offers us two models for reimagining seniority: Dumbledore's personal progress and the benefit that the rest of the world accrues from his old age.

Clearly, Dumbledore has read the literature on healthy aging. He is a brisk walker, and walking is probably the single most powerful health measure a man of his age can take. He surrounds himself with a supportive social network, including peers like Prof. McGonagall and younger friends like the Molly and Arthur Weasley, and of course Harry himself. Granted, he never married, but perhaps he's gay. He drinks red wine. He keeps busy, both with work and with leisure. He never abandons his own education, which helps keep him mentally sharp. Perhaps most importantly, he adapts to the changes that come with age. His magical Pensieve is a wonderful example. He finds he has a hard time keeping track of his memories, but instead of slipping into a depression at not being able to recall things the way he could in his youth, he invents the pensieve in order to record them. Now his mind is more valuable than ever. It is obvious that Dumbledore has lived a rich and happy life, despite great losses.

More important, in my opinion, is the social place that Dumbledore occupies. He is the most powerful, respected, beloved and relied-upon figure in Rowling's world, and no one ever seems to think of Dumbledore as young for his age. "Very old" is I think the first description we get of him. Old Dumbledore, though, seems to be the best he's ever been. What makes him a powerful wizard is his experience. He can tell Harry things he would never find in a library, allowing the boy to benefit from all his acquired experience. It's the oral tradition at its finest. If the headmaster of Hogwarts were a young wizard, no matter how talented, he would never have as much to teach Harry because he would simply lack Dumbledore's perspective on history.

Don't we all secretly wish for a Dumbledore in our own lives? Perhaps this is part of the appeal of the series. Though its hero is a boy, that boy is guided by an old man, someone we would all aspire to become, and wish to have for a friend and teacher. No one would trade the aged Dumbledore for the young Dumbledore we later get to see. Age has made him great. It may be worth pointing out that sages are cropping up all over popular works, from the Lord of the Rings to X-Men. Perhaps that reflects a culture that is ready to embrace the benefits of age, and more importantly yet, to appreciate the wonderful resource that older people are for the young.

*Details of the calculation: We know that when Hagrid left Hogwarts as a student, Voldemort was sixteen years old. We are told that fifty years have elapsed in between that incident and the opening of the Chamber of Secrets in Harry's second year at school. We learn in the sixth book that Dumbledore visited the boy Voldemort to recruit him for Hogwarts, which would have had to be five years before the Hagrid incident. At the time of the visit, Dumbledore is already a Hogwarts teacher, albeit a young man. So if we hazard a conservative guess that Dumbledore was about 25 at the time of the visit, and know that fifty-five years have elapsed since, he would be about 80 at the time of Harry's second year, and approaching 85 at the end of the sixth book. You are such a nerd for caring.