Latest / Muggle Snuggle: A Boring Harry Potter Podcast to make you Sleep / Muggle Tales: a gentle tale of muggle companions

Transcript

Muggle Tales: a gentle tale of muggle companions · Muggle Snuggle: A Boring Harry Potter Podcast to make you Sleep

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Not a moral. Not a message. Just a feeling. The
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: feeling of being held. The feeling of being known. The
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: feeling of being part of something vast and ancient and kind.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: The feeling that has been in the library since the beginning.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: That will be in the library until the end. That
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: is in the library now. In the deepest part of
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: the night. In the deepest part of the sleep. in
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: the deepest part of the dream, in the deepest part
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: of you. You are waking. Not quickly. Not suddenly. The
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: library does not believe in sudden waking. It believes in
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: the slow, gentle return to consciousness the way the tide
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: returns to the shore, gradually, patiently. with a rhythm that
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: is so slow and so steady that you can barely
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: tell it is happening. Accept that one moment you are
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: in the deep, and the next moment you are in
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the shallows, and the next moment you are on the shore.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: And the sand is warm beneath you, and the sky
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: is above you, and the world is there, waiting, as
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: it always waits, as it always will wait, with the
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: patience of a library, with the patience of a book.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: with the patience of a story that knows you will
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: come back, that has always known you will come back
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: because the story is not finished, because the story is
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: never finished, because the story goes on even when you
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: are not listening, even when you are not reading, even
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: when you are not asleep. The library is still around you.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: The chair is still beneath you. The cup is still
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: in your hands, or it was, and now it is
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: on the table. Because you put it down, at some
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: point in your sleep and the library caught it, the
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: way the library catches everything, gently, silently, without fuss, without judgment.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: without the slightest trace of reproach for the fact that
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: you fell asleep with a cup in your hands, because
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: falling asleep with a cup in your hands is one
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: of the great pleasures of life, and the library has
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: seen it happen a thousand times, and it will see
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: it happen a thousand more, and it does not mind.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: It does not mind at all, because the library loves
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: the people who fall asleep in it, loves them the
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: way a parent loves a child, with a love that
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: is so deep and so old and so constant that
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: it has become indistinguishable from the fabric of the library itself,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: from the stone and the wood and the paper and
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: the ink and the silence and the warmth and the light.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: The candles are still burning, the floating candles. The colored candles.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: The candles of every shade and hue that mark the
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: hours of the night. They are burning with the color
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: of dawn now, not the gold of late afternoon, not
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: the violet of midnight, not the green of the deepest sleep,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: but the particular unnamed color of the moment just before
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: the sun rises, when the sky is not yet light
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: but is no longer dark, when the world is poised
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: between night and day, between sleep and waking, between the
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: dream and the reality, and the two are so close together,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: so intertwined, so inextricably, mixed that you cannot tell where
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: one ends and the other begins. The portraits on the
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: wall are still sleeping. The sleeping people, the sleeping cat,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: All of them dreaming their painted dreams. All of them
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: breathing their painted breaths. They do not wake when you wake.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: They are on a different schedule, a different rhythm, a
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: different cycle of sleep and waking that has nothing to
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: do with yours and everything to do with theirs. They
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: will wake eventually. They always do. But not yet. Not now.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Now is your time. Not theirs. Now is the time
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: for you to stretch and to blink and to feel
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: the weight of the chair beneath you and the warmth
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: of the room around you and the particular quality of
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: your own body rested and restored, ready to face whatever
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: comes next, ready to carry the feeling of the library
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: with you into the day, into the world, into the long, complicated, beautiful, heartbreaking, extraordinary, mundane, miraculous, tedious,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: magnificent thing that is being alive. Think stand up, the
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: chair sighs, a small soft sigh, the sigh of a
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: chair that has held someone and is glad it held them,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: the sigh of a chair that knows it will hold
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: them again, and is patient, and is glad, and is warm.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: The table is beside you. The cup is on the table.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: The cup is empty now, or nearly so. You drank
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: it all, at some point, in your sleep, and the
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: library refilled it, because that is what the library does.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: It gives you what you need when you need it.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: without being asked, without being expected, without the slightest trace
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: of conditions or obligations or the complicated web of reciprocity
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: that governs most human exchanges, you leave the cup on
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: the table, you will come back for it. The library
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: knows this. The library will keep it warm. The library
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: will keep it full. The library will keep everything, the chair,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: the cup, the book, the candle, the silence, the warmth,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: exactly as it is, waiting for you for as long
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: as you need it, which is always, which is forever,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: which is the amount of time that the library has,
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: which is all the time there is. You walk back
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: through the library. The shelves are as they were, curving, organic, glowing, breathing, dreaming.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: The sleeping books are still sleeping. The weather books are
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: still whispering. The forgotten feelings are still glowing in their
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: particular shades of unnamed color. The books of you, the
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: personal libraries, the books that are about every person who
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: has ever fallen asleep in this chair, are on their shelf,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: safe and warm and dreaming their particular dreams. We reach
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: the door, the door that is made of old wood,
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: with the brass handle that is warm from a thousand touches.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: You put your hand on the handle. It is warm.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: It is the warmth of all the people who have
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: touched it before you. All the people who have stood
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: where you are standing and done what you are about
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: to do, which is to leave, which is to go back,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: which is to return to the waking world, to the
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: world of clocks and calendars and obligations and expectations and
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: the relentless, exhausting, beautiful, necessary noise of being alive. But first,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: just for a moment, you pause. You stand at the
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: door with your hand on the handle and you feel
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: the warmth and you feel the library behind you and
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: you feel the silence. And you feel the darkness. And
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: you feel the sleep. And you feel the dream. And
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: you feel the feeling. The bare, unadorned, uncomplicated feeling of
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: it is good to be. And you let it settle
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: into you. The way the cups warp settled into your hands.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: The way the moonlight settled through the arrow slits. The
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: way the candlelight settled into the shadows. You let it
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: become part of you. The way the library has become
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: part of you. The way the story has become part
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: of you. The way the whisper has become part of you.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And then you open the door. And you step through.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: And you are in the corridor. And the corridor is warm.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: And the moonlight is falling through the arrow slits. And
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: the sleeping portraits are on the wall. And the blue-white
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: candle is floating ahead of you. leading you back, the
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: way it led you here, with the quiet authority of
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: something that has led this way a thousand times and
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: will lead it a thousand more. You walk back through
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: the corridor, the warm stone beneath your feet, the moonlight
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: through the arrow slits, the sleeping portraits on the wall,
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: the blue-white candle floating ahead of you. And as you walk,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: You feel the library receding behind you, not disappearing. The
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: library never disappears. But receding, the way a dream recedes
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: when you wake, the way a memory recedes when you
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: turn away from it, the way the past recedes when
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: you step into the present. It is still there. It
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: will always be there. But it is behind you now,
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: and the world is ahead of you, and the world
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: is waiting.