Staring at marked slices of tree, hallucinating vividly
March 29, 2015
| All your life you have been watching the moon track through its phases. Even if you have not been paying much attention, it’s been there. But because the moon is tidally locked to Earth — meaning it spins on its axis once every orbit around Earth — you have only seen one face of its globe. Every month, it’s the same “man in the moon” dark and light patches. Until the space age began, no one had ever, ever seen the moon’s other face.
Mr and Mrs Granger of London were proud to say that they had a witch for a daughter. Not that they said it much, or at all, to anyone. But they were proud all the same. Proud, that is, until their daughter, Hermione, wiped all trace of her existence from their memory.
You hear a lot about people “addicted” to the Internet, whether it’s the Internet as a whole, or articles telling you how to stop being “addicted to Facebook” or “addicted to your phone.” Sometimes they actually do mean real addiction, but more often, those articles use “addiction” in the colloquial, where it’s just inconvenient to be without access to the Internet—not a real illness.