It’s almost as if Dumbledore stepped out from the page, looked the readers in the eyes, and spoke directly to them. The words were said as much for Harry as they were for the millions of captivated hearts holding the final book of this epic tale in their trembling hands. No, this is not just a story. It may be fiction, but it’s not fake. Harry Potter, like so many great works of literature before it, is more than real.

In a stroke of true genius, J.K. Rowling offers her audience the validation they deeply longed to hear after being whisked away on this magical journey for seven long books. Through Dumbledore, she writes to those who “have stuck with Harry until the very end”: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Harry Potter is the story of a boy — the Boy Who Lived. There is something special about stories, especially those which are so brilliantly crafted. Stories teach us. “They are not practical”, you might hear the most learned among us say. And they are right. Stories do not teach us math or science or history or business or any skill that can be used in the work force. They are far more important than such trivial knowledge. Stories teach us something deeper and far more powerful than how to balance a checkbook or change a tire. They teach us about what it really means to live. Stories remind us of what truly matters.

If we take a step back from Harry Potter for just a moment to visit another great tale, we might find what it is about The Boy Who Lived that makes his story so special. Samwise Gamgee, from Lord of the Rings, had this to say about stories that truly matter, “The Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something….There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo…and it’s worth fighting for.” From before he could walk and talk, Harry Potter was marked with a scar. This little lightning bolt shaped image on his forehead was not only a mark of triumph — the triumph of a Mother’s Love over the powers of the Dark Lord — but also a mark of the dark and dangerous path he soon must follow. Along this path, Harry and his friends would indeed have many chances to turn back. After all, Harry is just a boy, and the burdens he’d be asked to carry are far more than those of a child. Only Harry does not turn back. Nor do his friends, who comically at times wonder what it would be like to have a normal life. Instead, they tell Harry with the utmost loyalty, “You said it once before, that there was time to turn back if we wanted to. We’ve had time, haven’t we? We’re with you whatever happens.” Despite the difficulty of their path, they do not turn back because they are holding onto something worth fighting for. They have, as Harry tells his companions, “one thing that Voldemort doesn’t have.”

This is the thread that runs throughout Harry Potter. In a story that is abounding with the similarities between our hero and our villain, it is clearly their differences that determines who will win in the end. Dumbledore must constantly remind Harry of this subtle but important fact. After all, Harry and Voldemort do share quite a lot. The young Tom Riddle wields this very point against Harry during their interactions in the Chamber of Secrets when he pointedly states: “There are strange likenesses between us.” The Sorting Hat did originally want to put Harry into the Slytherin House, did it not? More than that, Harry and Voldemort’s wands share the same core, both were orphaned as children, both speak Parseltongue, both were raised by Muggles, and the list goes on. This truth haunts Harry throughout the rest of his time at Hogwarts. It is one of the hurdles he must learn to overcome, and in time he does. Though their differences may be few in number, they are enormous in substance.

What exactly makes these two so vastly different? They are the things that must always separate our heroes from our villains. They are the essence of life itself. They are the foundations that make us human. They are the principles that Tom Riddle so tragically cast aside long ago, prompting many in the Wizarding World to wonder whether he even “had enough human left in him to die”. With each passing year of Harry’s education at Hogwarts, Dumbledore tries desperately to make Harry see that his greatest weapons lie in the kind of magic that Voldemort was simply too arrogant to ever consider.

In the Sorcerer’s Stone Dumbledore tells Harry, “To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.” In Chamber of Secrets, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” In Prisoner of Azkaban, “You think the dead we have loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? You did see your father last night, Harry…you found him inside yourself.” In Goblet of Fire, “We are only as strong as we are united, only as weak as we are divided. Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust.” In Order of the Phoenix, after the death of Harry’s godfather, “There is no shame in what you are feeling…On the contrary…the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength.” In Half-Blood Prince, “You are protected, in short, by your ability to love! The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort’s! In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart…You have flitted into Lord Voldemort’s mind without damage to yourself, but he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony…he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole.” And finally, in The Deathly Hallows, as Harry’s journey comes so close to its end, Dumbledore tells Harry more plainly than he ever had before, “His knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry. That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.”

As the connection between Harry and Voldemort grows, Voldemort seeks to take advantage by possessing and influencing Harry’s mind. And he is successful — so successful in fact that he leads Harry into a costly trap that will result in the death of Sirius Black, Harry’s godfather and only living family. There is a magical defense for this, however, called Occlumency. It is a difficult kind of magic, only ever mastered by truly great wizards. Occlumency is the ability to fight against against such breaches of the mind. Dumbledore, naturally, implores Harry to learn this skill. But despite his efforts, Harry is unable to attain even a rudimentary handling of the subject. So Voldemort continues to hold sway over the thoughts and dreams and feelings of our young hero. Except, of course, at two very pivotal moments in Harry’s life. The first is after the death of Sirius, when Voldemort is cast out of his mind in agony. The second also comes after a death, that of Harry’s friend and guardian, Dobby the house-elf. And it is after this death, that Harry finally understands what Dumbledore had told him years ago. It was here, where he realized that it “mattered not that [he] could not close [his] mind. It was [his] heart that saved [him].” As he stands by the body of his lost companion, digging the grave for a proper burial, he feels a prickle in his scar that so often brought him to his knees in pain. But this time, he was the “master of the pain”. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that in this moment Voldemort’s “thoughts could not penetrate [him] now, while he mourned Dobby. Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out…though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love…”

“The Boy Who Lived”. Harry was given the moniker as an infant when he became famous as the only person to ever survive The Killing Curse. In a twisted sense, Voldemort’s followers might have been tempted to give their master a similar title. He too, was a man who lived. He beat death by splitting his soul seven ways, leaving behind parts of himself in horcruxes so that he might rise again. And yet, in the end, death came for him all the same. His physical self perishes at the end of our story, but his humanity had died long before our story even began. Voldemort pursued immortal life at all cost, including the sacrifice of his own soul.

Harry himself had a chance at the immortality and power Lord Voldemort always sought. In the legend of the three Deathly Hallows, it was always rumored that whoever possessed each of the objects would themselves become master over death. But as Harry walks through the forest with two of the three in hand, he dreams not of immortality or power. Rather, he dreams of those he loves. In these final moments, we see with clarity what Harry’s story has been trying to teach us all along: The things that make life worth living are the very same things worth dying for. And so, as Harry makes his way towards Lord Voldemort, ready to sacrifice himself as the final horcrux so that his friends may live, we are not meant to pity him. We are to pity the young boy Tom Riddle, who threw everything away to escape a physical death, and “lived without love”. Harry Potter is the Boy Who Lived, not because he survived The Killing Curse, but because he is the boy who loved.

Harry Potter is not about witches and wizards, not really. No good story is truly about those things which are most easily seen on the surface. Instead, this is a story that points to the real life magic which can be found all around us — the magic of love and friendship and courage and sacrifice and loyalty and perseverance and adventure. It’s about the things that drive out the darkness in our own lives, even if we are not tasked with facing a powerful Dark Wizard. Perhaps you’ll tell me that this is all just cliche, that I’m speaking of childish things. Maybe you’ll tell me to wake up and get my head out of the clouds. Well for your sake, I will simply hope along with C.S. Lewis that “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”