I  finished Harry Potter this morning while working out at the gym. Very surprising ending, and I gained a lot of respect for J.K. Rowling as an author. One section at the end really struck me:

"Tell me one last thing, said Harry. "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?" . . .  "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

This struck me on several levels. I think about how its philosophical implications. I think about how this validates autoethnography. This supports the humanities. The creative process. Qualitative research. Anything that looks at making meaning and sense of our experience in any ways outside of a scientific approach that tends to reduce us to a similarity with numbers.

There are many things that are real and yet can not be quantified. This is one of the things I learned about Severus Snape; be careful about assumptions–they often lead us astray when we feel we have to see to believe.

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