How I visited the place that inspired JK Rowling to write Harry Potter.
…and what I learned about storytelling and being human.
Everyone likes Harry Potter movies. Especially during the New Year holidays.
This made me remember my trip to Porto, Portugal.
One of the places I visited was Livraria Lello.
It’s one of the most unique places to see in Porto, known for its architecture and interior design.
I read somewhere that the owner was struggling financially for a long time even when the place became an attraction.
In 2015, Lello began charging an entrance fee to control the crowds. To be more accurate, they sell €5 vouchers that can go towards the purchase of any book in the store. So visiting the bookstore is still free, as long as you buy a book.
But what the library is more famous for is the story that JK Rowling got the inspiration for parts of Harry Potter from the architecture of this library. What is mentioned very often is the Hogwarts library, the Grand Staircase, or the Harry Potter scenes inside Ollivanders, the wand shop!
Everyone that I spoke to, shared an absolute conviction that this was the case. So did I.
Factually, JK Rowling did spend some time in Porto while writing a Harry Potter book.
She moved to Porto after the death of her mother, Anne, in 1991. The author went to teach English classes, got married, had a daughter and it was here that she wrote the first three chapters of the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
And when you take these three data points into account, somehow it makes so much sense:
She lived there
The library looks like classroom in a wizard school.
All people that I met were saying she was inspired here.
Something in me made me restless and I wanted to check additionally.
I am a skeptic by nature, and I have a strong tendency to always be the closest to the truth, even though in many areas of life you can never be sure whether something is 100% accurate.
After some research I found this tweet:
There it is. Confirmation from the source.
JK has a whole landing page on her website dismantling proposed places that inspired her, and giving due to the places that actually did. In some cases it would be just a random three under which she wrote a couple of pages.
I have to admit when I found out I was a bit disappointed. Because the story made absolute sense. I could just feel it in my bones that this was the truth.
So did many other people.
She still made effort to cheer up disappointed fans by sharing she actually spend a lot of time writing in the famous Majestic Cafe.
Another confirmed fact is that the name Salazar Slytherin, one of the four founders of Hogwarts and the namesake of Slytherin House, is named after the dictator who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968.
But why is our mind making the connections so easily and without evidence?
Such is the power of the Narrative Fallacy — the backward-looking mental tripwire that causes us to attribute a linear and discernible cause-and-effect chain to our knowledge of the past. As Nassim points out, there is a deep biological basis to the problem: we are inundated with so much sensory information that our brains have no other choice; we must put things in order so we can process the world around us.
These types of stories strike a deep chord: They give us deep, affecting reasons on which to hang our understanding of reality. They help us make sense of our own lives. And, most importantly, they frequently cause us to believe we can predict the future. The problem is, most of them are a sham.
What I learned from this experience is the need to:
Be aware of these fallacies of the human mind.
Whenever possible - be close to the truth.
Where not possible - accept randomness and give up the need to tell yourself a story to fill in the gaps just so it would make sense.
It is ok to say - I don’t know, and I can’t explain it.
But when I find something that I am almost certain it is true, the way to share it with people is not with factual data, it is with storytelling.
It’s how we are wired and for many centuries this will remain the ultimate truth.