Four shades of love (and lack thereof)
My mind has been focusing lately on the things I disliked about DH (and man oh man were there many) so I thought I'd shift gears for a bit and reflect on what I liked about the conclusion to the series.
One thing delighted me above all else as I finished reading DH: I loved the symbolism painted by the four key characters, Harry, Voldemort, Snape and Dumbledore. My feeling is, they each embody a fantastic extreme in the ways a person can possess the two polar components of loving capacity, which I will call here the "wide scope" and "narrow scope" of love.
The narrow-scope love is the love you feel for those personally close to you. Harry loves his parents dearly, and his friends, and, as he gets older, the girls that he falls in love with. That kind of love. Narrow in focus. This type of love has a very concrete, specific and non-interchangeable target, and in that sense can be thought of as somewhat selfish. Selfish, but important love nonetheless. Lily's selfish love for her son ends up saving the entire world.
The wide-scope love is the opposite in terms of target scope. It's the intrinsic love for all living beings that normal people feel at some level or another -- the humanitarian kind of love. If you saw a baby about to fall into a well, you'd rush to save them even if they're not your own child, or any child that you even know of, wouldn't you? You'd just do it, anyone would just do it. Of course, you might not choose to rush forward if your own baby was about to crawl into a fire at the same moment, or if running toward that well would put your own person at risk -- like, say, if this was happening in the middle of a battle field with bullets flying left and right. So, the wide-scope love is always pitted against not only self-love but also the narrow-scope love at any given instant... Which is what makes life interesting and sometimes devastating for us all in the real world.
In the HP tale of the power of love preserving the world, we have the protagonist and his nemesis, the two polar opposites in the scheme of Good vs. Evil, and two other characters featuring prominently throughout the series, the omniscient patriarch and the ambiguous trickster. I think these four sketch out a polarized combination pattern of having and not having the two types of love, as follows:
narrow + narrow −wide
+Harry Dumbledore wide
−SnapeVoldemort
Voldemort, obviously, represents the cautionary tale of what happens to someone who lacks both narrow-scope and wide-scope love. His supreme status of evilness is characterized by both how he plots world-scale massacres and how he has nobody on earth to love enough that their death would be even marginally painful to him. Indeed, he killed his own father at age 16, along with two other people that just happened to be there. Lucius, Bellatrix and even Crouch Jr. had at least someone they deeply cared for (or whose caring for them they sensed and appreciated). But Voldemort didn't, and that's how he ended up being not just a garden-variety bad guy but the ultimate evil monster.
Harry stands in a pretty obvious position, too: he's eminently "capable of love," the exact opposite of Voldemort. Harry starts out, as all kids start out, by having a very narrow type of love dominating his universe. His loving capacity at that stage is only subtly extreme -- he loves his mother and father very strongly, to the point that being with them again is his deepest wish; he adores his friends, and treats them much better than how Draco treats his entourage (or, arguably, James seems to have treated his). Such focused and strong love of Harry's, however, eventually morphs into a kind of love that spans the entire world. That's how he becomes the ultimate hero in the end, and the reason why his Sacrificial Death doesn't save just Ginny, or just Ron and Hermione, or just his own child (as Lily's death has done), but protects everybody fighting Voldemort -- including even those he doesn't know the names of. So he has arrived at a place where he feels very, very strongly about protecting all living people, with the same level of intensity as normal people reserve for wishing well on their own loved ones. While I don't like DH's Jesus metaphor any more than the next person, here I'd at least like to point out that Harry's Jesus is unique for filling the dual roles of the Christian [Father] God and Jesus [*] at the same time (by preordained fate more than anything else), rather than playing the Jesus to Dumbledore's [Father] God, as you might assume by straightforward analogy.
Because Dumbledore is not the paragon of all-encompassing love that Harry ultimately becomes. Harry by the end of DH supersedes him, clearly and incontrovertibly, in his Capacity for Love (and consequent Mastery of Death), because he manages to do what the [Father] God does with his son Jesus, a painful personal sacrifice, by forcing himself to walk away from Ron and Hermione and Ginny toward his own death to save people far and near -- whereas his Leader just carried out wise strategies that happened to pain him not so much. Why didn't they pain him? Because he has no Ron, Hermione or Ginny, and has never had one in his adult life. Albus is a person who loves the entirety of the human race with such vehemence that he would take it upon himself to spend his whole life combating the world's evils. But his capacity for narrow-scope love, which we feel may have been pretty lacking to begin with (the way he could just leave Ariana behind and neglect her, in whatever delicate mental state she was in, to pursue his own intellectual fascination, speaks volumes of his original personality), eventually died an untimely death along with his teenage infatuation with Grindelwald. What he became then is the kind of a man capable of ordering a seventeen-year-old to death without a trace of remorse (observe and weep as he speaks pages of sage explanations to Harry, while not uttering a single word of apology on the matter of having him march to what he was made to perceive as his own death). It's the kind of a man who can strongarm his faithful subordinate, whom he has known for 23 years out of his 36-year life, into murdering him at point-blank range so that a worthier, as-yet untainted soul can escape self-destruction. Personal love almost never hinders this man in his pursuit of loving and protecting humanity at large. The only time he ever slips is with Harry, and he says: "That was a weakness on my part, and my mistake, as I thought I of all people wouldn't be impeded by such feelings" (Ch.37, OotP). His many callous words to the anguished Snape in the pensieve scenes are also pretty spine-chilling for a man promoting love. But they're understandable if you know they're coming from his incapacity for narrow-scope love -- which BTW is a key factor that makes him so good at his job as commander. In this universe, if he hadn't cold-heartedly ordered Harry to commit suicide, then Voldemort would have won. So Dumbledore is the kind of a person you're glad is out there somewhere saving the world, but don't necessarily want to become friends with, or even get very close to if you can help it, for fear of your own safety and sanity. His own estranged brother attests to this and advises Harry to turn his back on him -- even without knowing Albus' final plan for Harry.
Contrastively, Snape is the epitome of people with huge amounts of the narrow-scope love and nothing else in their hearts. He has little to no sense of the societal loving morality -- at least at the beginning of his long redemptive journey. As a child at Hogwarts, he associates closely with future Death Eaters that he has been Sorted to live with, and has nothing but defensive words for their actions on "mudbloods," even when pressed. It's only when the persecuted group in question becomes Lily the person, whom he also loves with a narrowly focused obsession, that the worldview of his friends starts to pose any kind of dilemma for him (and not much, at that). And, as much as it pains me to say this as a Snape-lover, I think he probably felt pretty OK with all the atrocities going on around Voldemort when he was his faithful follower... Except, of course, when it came to Lily's life being threatened. In other words, until then, he failed to appreciate the fact that each victim of the Death Eaters must be somebody's Lily -- that didn't matter to him because "somebody" never had the power to move him. But the prospect of his own loved one being murdered by his master broke the deal for Snape completely, because ultimately, he doesn't really care about what the world at large is going to turn out like, nearly as much as he cares about his closest friends and love interests. "Kill the infant if you will, kill the husband, I don't care," he is reported to have told Voldemort, "but I can't bear it if Lily dies. Spare her, I beg of you, I will do anything." That's his mentality all along, which Voldemort in his completely loveless existence failed to grasp, but Dumbledore, who is not entirely loveless, managed to understand enough to cultivate. (Understanding he could manage, although sympathizing he was utterly incapable of, as we saw on the windy hilltop.)
So all this is to say... First of all, watching these fantasy characters with their extreme forms of love was neat, in this story of Love Power. And I really loved the dynamics woven into the whole series through the interaction of such extreme characters, especially the dramatic tension created among the men with "lopsided" loving capacities.
Like the Snape-Sirius antipathy, which seethed with a burning intensity that we didn't fully comprehend until DH (if anything, it looked like it might be an oil-and-water situation between two incompatible souls) -- but which now is revealed to have been the explosive collision of two characters with the same strong personal love driving their worlds. Sirius loved James more than his own brother; he died at the hands of evil Death Eaters, of which Snape used to be one; now Sirius feels fiercely protective towards Harry, as an extension of his love for James, and can't stand being locked up in a safehouse while a slimeball like Snape gets to teach and protect him. Snape loved Lily intensely, and she died because of Sirius' stupidity in entrusting her life to a weak-minded coward; he secretly devotes his life to protecting Harry, as Lily would have wanted to do herself. But Harry never listens to Snape and always turns to Sirius, whose influence of impulsiveness and arrogant self-reliance can only put the boy in more danger than he's already in. No wonder these two never stood a chance of seeing eye-to-eye. It's tragic, and wonderfully dramatic, now that we're given the whole picture.
Then there's the Dumbledore-Snape relationship, which is quietly chilling for the dark undercurrent of fundamental incompatibility running right through the faithful alliance -- an alliance that began with a burningly contemptuous "You disgust me," on Dumbledore's part, and ended with a hard face etched with "revulsion and hatred," on Snape's part, as he carried out Dumbledore's murder. Each man fulfilled an irreplaceable function in the execution of their war against total lovelessness, which could only be fulfilled because of who these men were inside, but their teamwork forced them to each endure an unenviable existence. Neither of them could comprehend the other's inner feelings at all, as each was driven by the type of love that the other significantly lacked. The white deaf phoenix and the black blind bat, loyally cooperating to save the world, remained tragically irreconcilable to the very end.
That's drama, that's beautiful. It all hurts, but in a delicious kind of pain that makes us reflect on our own (less extreme) lives. All sundry frustrations aside, I wanted to applaud DH for tying up the series on this note.
Thoughts, developments, and criticisms of all shapes and sizes are extremely welcome! Although I'm very bad at responding to each comment, so I apologize about that in advance...
One thing delighted me above all else as I finished reading DH: I loved the symbolism painted by the four key characters, Harry, Voldemort, Snape and Dumbledore. My feeling is, they each embody a fantastic extreme in the ways a person can possess the two polar components of loving capacity, which I will call here the "wide scope" and "narrow scope" of love.
The narrow-scope love is the love you feel for those personally close to you. Harry loves his parents dearly, and his friends, and, as he gets older, the girls that he falls in love with. That kind of love. Narrow in focus. This type of love has a very concrete, specific and non-interchangeable target, and in that sense can be thought of as somewhat selfish. Selfish, but important love nonetheless. Lily's selfish love for her son ends up saving the entire world.
The wide-scope love is the opposite in terms of target scope. It's the intrinsic love for all living beings that normal people feel at some level or another -- the humanitarian kind of love. If you saw a baby about to fall into a well, you'd rush to save them even if they're not your own child, or any child that you even know of, wouldn't you? You'd just do it, anyone would just do it. Of course, you might not choose to rush forward if your own baby was about to crawl into a fire at the same moment, or if running toward that well would put your own person at risk -- like, say, if this was happening in the middle of a battle field with bullets flying left and right. So, the wide-scope love is always pitted against not only self-love but also the narrow-scope love at any given instant... Which is what makes life interesting and sometimes devastating for us all in the real world.
In the HP tale of the power of love preserving the world, we have the protagonist and his nemesis, the two polar opposites in the scheme of Good vs. Evil, and two other characters featuring prominently throughout the series, the omniscient patriarch and the ambiguous trickster. I think these four sketch out a polarized combination pattern of having and not having the two types of love, as follows:
narrow + narrow −wide
+Harry Dumbledore wide
−SnapeVoldemort
Voldemort, obviously, represents the cautionary tale of what happens to someone who lacks both narrow-scope and wide-scope love. His supreme status of evilness is characterized by both how he plots world-scale massacres and how he has nobody on earth to love enough that their death would be even marginally painful to him. Indeed, he killed his own father at age 16, along with two other people that just happened to be there. Lucius, Bellatrix and even Crouch Jr. had at least someone they deeply cared for (or whose caring for them they sensed and appreciated). But Voldemort didn't, and that's how he ended up being not just a garden-variety bad guy but the ultimate evil monster.
Harry stands in a pretty obvious position, too: he's eminently "capable of love," the exact opposite of Voldemort. Harry starts out, as all kids start out, by having a very narrow type of love dominating his universe. His loving capacity at that stage is only subtly extreme -- he loves his mother and father very strongly, to the point that being with them again is his deepest wish; he adores his friends, and treats them much better than how Draco treats his entourage (or, arguably, James seems to have treated his). Such focused and strong love of Harry's, however, eventually morphs into a kind of love that spans the entire world. That's how he becomes the ultimate hero in the end, and the reason why his Sacrificial Death doesn't save just Ginny, or just Ron and Hermione, or just his own child (as Lily's death has done), but protects everybody fighting Voldemort -- including even those he doesn't know the names of. So he has arrived at a place where he feels very, very strongly about protecting all living people, with the same level of intensity as normal people reserve for wishing well on their own loved ones. While I don't like DH's Jesus metaphor any more than the next person, here I'd at least like to point out that Harry's Jesus is unique for filling the dual roles of the Christian [Father] God and Jesus [*] at the same time (by preordained fate more than anything else), rather than playing the Jesus to Dumbledore's [Father] God, as you might assume by straightforward analogy.
Because Dumbledore is not the paragon of all-encompassing love that Harry ultimately becomes. Harry by the end of DH supersedes him, clearly and incontrovertibly, in his Capacity for Love (and consequent Mastery of Death), because he manages to do what the [Father] God does with his son Jesus, a painful personal sacrifice, by forcing himself to walk away from Ron and Hermione and Ginny toward his own death to save people far and near -- whereas his Leader just carried out wise strategies that happened to pain him not so much. Why didn't they pain him? Because he has no Ron, Hermione or Ginny, and has never had one in his adult life. Albus is a person who loves the entirety of the human race with such vehemence that he would take it upon himself to spend his whole life combating the world's evils. But his capacity for narrow-scope love, which we feel may have been pretty lacking to begin with (the way he could just leave Ariana behind and neglect her, in whatever delicate mental state she was in, to pursue his own intellectual fascination, speaks volumes of his original personality), eventually died an untimely death along with his teenage infatuation with Grindelwald. What he became then is the kind of a man capable of ordering a seventeen-year-old to death without a trace of remorse (observe and weep as he speaks pages of sage explanations to Harry, while not uttering a single word of apology on the matter of having him march to what he was made to perceive as his own death). It's the kind of a man who can strongarm his faithful subordinate, whom he has known for 23 years out of his 36-year life, into murdering him at point-blank range so that a worthier, as-yet untainted soul can escape self-destruction. Personal love almost never hinders this man in his pursuit of loving and protecting humanity at large. The only time he ever slips is with Harry, and he says: "That was a weakness on my part, and my mistake, as I thought I of all people wouldn't be impeded by such feelings" (Ch.37, OotP). His many callous words to the anguished Snape in the pensieve scenes are also pretty spine-chilling for a man promoting love. But they're understandable if you know they're coming from his incapacity for narrow-scope love -- which BTW is a key factor that makes him so good at his job as commander. In this universe, if he hadn't cold-heartedly ordered Harry to commit suicide, then Voldemort would have won. So Dumbledore is the kind of a person you're glad is out there somewhere saving the world, but don't necessarily want to become friends with, or even get very close to if you can help it, for fear of your own safety and sanity. His own estranged brother attests to this and advises Harry to turn his back on him -- even without knowing Albus' final plan for Harry.
Contrastively, Snape is the epitome of people with huge amounts of the narrow-scope love and nothing else in their hearts. He has little to no sense of the societal loving morality -- at least at the beginning of his long redemptive journey. As a child at Hogwarts, he associates closely with future Death Eaters that he has been Sorted to live with, and has nothing but defensive words for their actions on "mudbloods," even when pressed. It's only when the persecuted group in question becomes Lily the person, whom he also loves with a narrowly focused obsession, that the worldview of his friends starts to pose any kind of dilemma for him (and not much, at that). And, as much as it pains me to say this as a Snape-lover, I think he probably felt pretty OK with all the atrocities going on around Voldemort when he was his faithful follower... Except, of course, when it came to Lily's life being threatened. In other words, until then, he failed to appreciate the fact that each victim of the Death Eaters must be somebody's Lily -- that didn't matter to him because "somebody" never had the power to move him. But the prospect of his own loved one being murdered by his master broke the deal for Snape completely, because ultimately, he doesn't really care about what the world at large is going to turn out like, nearly as much as he cares about his closest friends and love interests. "Kill the infant if you will, kill the husband, I don't care," he is reported to have told Voldemort, "but I can't bear it if Lily dies. Spare her, I beg of you, I will do anything." That's his mentality all along, which Voldemort in his completely loveless existence failed to grasp, but Dumbledore, who is not entirely loveless, managed to understand enough to cultivate. (Understanding he could manage, although sympathizing he was utterly incapable of, as we saw on the windy hilltop.)
So all this is to say... First of all, watching these fantasy characters with their extreme forms of love was neat, in this story of Love Power. And I really loved the dynamics woven into the whole series through the interaction of such extreme characters, especially the dramatic tension created among the men with "lopsided" loving capacities.
Like the Snape-Sirius antipathy, which seethed with a burning intensity that we didn't fully comprehend until DH (if anything, it looked like it might be an oil-and-water situation between two incompatible souls) -- but which now is revealed to have been the explosive collision of two characters with the same strong personal love driving their worlds. Sirius loved James more than his own brother; he died at the hands of evil Death Eaters, of which Snape used to be one; now Sirius feels fiercely protective towards Harry, as an extension of his love for James, and can't stand being locked up in a safehouse while a slimeball like Snape gets to teach and protect him. Snape loved Lily intensely, and she died because of Sirius' stupidity in entrusting her life to a weak-minded coward; he secretly devotes his life to protecting Harry, as Lily would have wanted to do herself. But Harry never listens to Snape and always turns to Sirius, whose influence of impulsiveness and arrogant self-reliance can only put the boy in more danger than he's already in. No wonder these two never stood a chance of seeing eye-to-eye. It's tragic, and wonderfully dramatic, now that we're given the whole picture.
Then there's the Dumbledore-Snape relationship, which is quietly chilling for the dark undercurrent of fundamental incompatibility running right through the faithful alliance -- an alliance that began with a burningly contemptuous "You disgust me," on Dumbledore's part, and ended with a hard face etched with "revulsion and hatred," on Snape's part, as he carried out Dumbledore's murder. Each man fulfilled an irreplaceable function in the execution of their war against total lovelessness, which could only be fulfilled because of who these men were inside, but their teamwork forced them to each endure an unenviable existence. Neither of them could comprehend the other's inner feelings at all, as each was driven by the type of love that the other significantly lacked. The white deaf phoenix and the black blind bat, loyally cooperating to save the world, remained tragically irreconcilable to the very end.
That's drama, that's beautiful. It all hurts, but in a delicious kind of pain that makes us reflect on our own (less extreme) lives. All sundry frustrations aside, I wanted to applaud DH for tying up the series on this note.
Thoughts, developments, and criticisms of all shapes and sizes are extremely welcome! Although I'm very bad at responding to each comment, so I apologize about that in advance...