disordered thought processes

I don't know why. I've been once again obsessed with the sad and sorry life of Severus Snape, and how he lost the only woman he loved, and how his life was effectively ended after she was murdered.

Thinking about it makes me physical ill, and yet I can't help but obsess.

Needless to say, this is mostly due to the disturbing parallels between my life thus far and his sad, pathetic story.

No, no, this is not to say that I was not loved as a child. In some ways, it's like I grew up with three sets of parents. This, of course, has its own pitfalls. But surely there is still an important difference between dysfunction and non-function. Oh yes, I had a dysfunctional childhood, that at least is clear, especially since my mother, of all people, has at last admitted as such.

I wasn't beaten. Much. Definitely not hard. No black eyes or bruises. Maybe red marks and welts from belts and slippers, but definitely nothing to call Child Protective Services over. And while my dad was/is very good at psychological warfare, and was pretty good at leveraging the threat of violence, he never hit my mom.

And while my parents haven't exactly been the epitome of, ah, marital bliss, they somehow managed to stay together, despite the affairs and the arguments and the accusations.

I wasn't poor, either. I wasn't rich, but who really was rich in the 1980's besides a bunch of crooks who are now working for the Bush Administration, selling oil, or selling cocaine and heroin? See, it's not really the absolute amount of wealth that defines one's means. It's the gradient.

So, while I had reasonably new clothes that weren't full of holes, and I even had a car in high school (albeit a car that was 10 years old, had 120,000 miles, didn't go over 80 mph, and had been in a massive accident), it didn't help that I was around people who had new clothes every week, who went on trips to Europe, and who got Lexuses and BMWs when they turned 16. Hilariously, the tactic of sending me, my brother, and my sister to private school ended up teaching us to hate the bourgeoisie, never mind the fact that we are part and parcel of the whole system anyway. We all ended up opting to go to public universities afterwards.

Sure, I grew up hating myself. What self-respecting teenager doesn't have a well-developed sense of self-loathing? Maybe the only fault—though it wasn't an uncommon mistake—was the fact that I had full-blown clinical depression for at least a couple of years, and no one really gave a shit about it.

Let's just say that my mind has been conditioned to see the dark side of everything, and it is probably unavoidable that I see myself as not having a very happy childhood. There were definitely some really good moments, but none of them ever lasted, and a lot of them went very badly indeed.

I did have a girlfriend when I was 16. Nevermind that our courtship was in many ways excruciatingly painful, as she dated a couple of guys and told me all about it before she finally decided to be with me. Maybe that's the happiest I've ever been. I think I was in love. Not that I can confidently say that I know what love is. But it was something.

I sometimes pat myself on my back whenever I think about how she tried to win me back after we broke up. Not that it matters much. She's married now and has a kid, and has at last stopped talking to me, which has always been how I figured it would turn out.

Oh. Why did we break up? She slept with another guy.

Oh, I recognize that most adolescent romances never go anywhere, but surely there are less traumatic ways to end a relationship.

Actually, the older I get, the more bitter I become about it. Not everyone gets their heart completely mutilated at the age of 18, you know.

Which leads me to the thing that I find the most painful, because there is absolutely no one to blame. Even twelve years out, I still wonder, even though it has no relevance at all on real life.

If I hadn't had my heart destroyed first, would I have had a fighting chance with the Woman of My Dreams?

This is where the whole Severus/Lily thing totally turns me inside-out. There is a woman whom I have been friends with for almost 13 years, but I fell in love with her, and I think that screwed everything up. And maybe it wouldn't have gone down that way if I didn't fall into a great big gaping pit of despair that one September evening 12 years ago, when my girlfriend told me she fucked some guy. Maybe I wouldn't have been so needy and desperate and helpless and hopeless and unable to function as a human being. Maybe I could've been a better friend, and there wouldn't've been this awful distance between us that I never dared to cross until it was too fucking late, and even then, maybe it wouldn't've mattered.

I've lost a lot of friends along the way. Well, not lost, not in this hyperconnected world we live in, where I can always IM them or message them through Facebook or Myspace. But they've definitely dropped out of my life. There used to be a time when I would call my oldest friend in the world at least once a month, if not once a week. At least drop him an e-mail, see how he's doing. My aforementioned ex-girlfriend, after we started talking to each other again, about five years after we broke up, used to call me up pretty often too. I last spoke to her maybe two years ago? Though I still hear about her from time to time thanks to the bizarrely provincial nature of the neighborhood I grew up in L.A.

The only people I see now with any regularity are my parents, my brother, and my dog. Oh, I hear from folks from time to time, but its never the same.

The upshot of all of this is that I've never been so alone in my entire life. If I worked in a cubicle, I bet you I could go for weeks on end without really talking to another human being, excepting the transactions over the counter or through a drive-through window. As it is, my job requires me to engage and gain the trust of human beings every single day. It's a wonder I can do it all, considering how completely burnt-out my soul feels sometimes.

Thank God for happy pills, I guess.

But She… She has always been a good friend to me, despite my raging madness, despite my more-than-occasional boorishness, despite my lack of social grace, despite my bitter melancholy, despite the fact that I don't answer the phone or return messages and never check in and say hi and ask how her husband and her kids are doing. Even when she had started dating her now-husband, and I ran away, crushed, defeated, directionless and unmoored, she sent me a card telling me that she missed my friendship. She even went on a road trip with two of our friends to visit me for my birthday that year.

When I had to make rushed plans for a clinical rotation in my fourth year and she was pregnant with her first child, she agreed to let me stay with her, her husband, her brother and his family because I didn't have anywhere else to stay.

Whenever I make my way back to their neighborhood, she and her husband always make sure to meet up with me, however briefly.

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The whole falling in love thing screws up a lot of good things, I guess. I think about Severus and his friendship with Lily. Here was a woman who always looked out for him, who treated him with respect, and who had insight into the good things about him.

Someone else brought up this passage and it sticks to me, how Lily could see in Severus what no one else seemed to:

"Really?" whispered Lily.

"Definitely," said Snape, and even with his poorly cut hair and his odd clothes, he struck an oddly impressive figure sprawled in front of her, brimful of confidence in his destiny.

You never get the exact time course of how everything fell apart. Did Severus get drawn to the Dark Arts precisely because he felt that this kind of power would be the only way he could keep James from taking Lily out his life? (Shades of Anakin Skywalker seep in.) That this was the only way he could keep himself safe from James and Sirius? Or was it because besides Lily, only the Death Eaters treated him with respect, recognized him for the powerful, talented wizard that he was? Only the Death Eaters gave him a sense of actually belonging, of being wanted.

Would he have had a chance with Lily if he had decided to eschew the Dark Arts and reject Voldemort?

Like all "what if" questions, there are always at least two equally correct answers, neither of which help with resolving anything.

On one hand, anything that is not expressly forbidden by the Laws of Physics (or, I suppose the Laws of Magick, in this case) is always possible, and in a possibly infinite universe (whether in terms of time or space or both, since the two are interwoven), everything that is possible is actually inevitable given enough time.

On the other hand, clearly we are asking questions about an alternate universe from which we cannot obtain any information from, meaning that, since it didn't happen, then there was no chance of it happening. The arrow of time turns even random chance into Fate. In other words, the answer is maybe, but it doesn't matter now, does it?

I've long stopped asking "what if" questions. Though in moments of weakness, I will slip.

Severus' "what if" haunts me because it is my "what if."

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But the more important question is this: if Severus did not fall in love with Lily, if Severus had understood what a good friend she was, and loved her back as a friend and nothing more, would it have gone down completely differently? Would he have striven harder to always have her back, to always support her, even when making decisions like deciding to marry James? Would the draw to the Dark Arts not matter, because he wouldn't be so desparate to keep her in his life, because he would understand that she really cared for him in her fashion, and that this wouldn't necessarily change just because she didn't have romantic feelings for him, and that her friendship was enough of a sense of belonging for him? Would it have mattered if he realized what she saw in him, and even though it didn't mean that she loved him in That Way™, it was still important, such that he would strive to always be someone who lived up to that ideal?

I suppose, in terms of the plot, it wouldn't've, because Lily would've probably still been killed, and Severus would've still stood against Voldemort because of it, and because of his talents for occlumency, he still would've been the best man for the job of infiltrating the Death Eaters.

But maybe he would've been less bitter, knowing that, although he didn't have True Love™, he had a True Friendship.

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I don't know. It would just be less sad and pathetic. The worst part was the scene where he found a letter Lily had written to Sirius, and ended up keeping the picture of her and her signature. As someone else brought up somewhere else on the Internet, I mean, c'mon, if they were friends, wouldn't you think he would've had a few letters and pictures of her actually addressed to him? I mean, this is just sad and stalkerish.

(Not that I don't keep everything she has ever written me, but still.)

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There has been much written about the fact that Severus follows the long tradition of Byronic heroes. Wikipedia gives this particular definition, which describes Manfred, the prototypical Byronic hero, and which also well describes Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities:

• conflicting emotions, bipolar tendencies, or moodiness
• self-critical and introspective
• struggles with integrity
• a distaste for social institutions and social norms
• being an exile, an outcast, or an outlaw
• a lack of respect for rank and privilege
• a troubled past
• being cynical, demanding, and/or arrogant
• often self-destructive
• loner, often rejected from society

I suppose contemporary pop culture has Anakin Skywalker to add to the list. And probably Batman, too.

I would also add Fëanor from The Silmarillion and Léon from "The Professional" Maybe even Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII, what with his unassuageable guilt regarding the death of Aeris, his eschewment of human companionship, and his somewhat self-destructive tendencies.

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The devastating sense of alienation from the rest of the human race is what haunts me. The rest of the world is mostly uncaring, and uninterested in the hero, but is frequently also hostile, to the point of seeking complete annihilation of the hero, total extirpation from the universe of human concourse, sometimes, even for good reason. (Huh, suddenly Elphaba from "Wicked" also comes to mind. I could probably keep going on and on, in wider and wider tangents.)

And for some damned reason, they always all seem to die violent, unhappy deaths, often alone and unmourned.

I suppose that is one of my greatest fears: to die in a meaningless, anonymous manner, with my entire existence on earth unheralded, forgotten. While, like most people, I fear losing the people who matter to me, I have unfortunately come to the sad, inescapable conclusion that death is unavoidable. As the Flaming Lips sing, "Do you realize/that everyone/you know/someday/will die." It gives me no pleasure to realize this, but I also recognize that there's no point in fearing it.

It seems that in some ways, Time and Fate have been honing me into some sort weapon. Not like some superhero ninja, James Bond-like, Takashi Kovacs-like, Jason Bourne-like weapon, but a moral weapon, meaning that whatever cause I find myself attached to, I will feel that it is my moral obligation to see it to the bitter end. I won't be able to stop it.

In other words, it sometimes feels like the rest of my life has nothing left for it but the preparation for death.

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I freely admit that this is not a normal thought for someone who is only 30 years old. In many ways, my life is still beginning. An astute clinician would simply chalk this up to being yet another symptom of my intractable depression. But like the Byronic heroes I've mentioned, there is this sense that a watershed moment has passed. The one possibility in my life—however infinitesimal the probability—that might have given me lasting happiness has passed, and there is no turning back. There is only onward to the black abyss of oblivion.

I do wonder what might've gone on in the mind of a character like Severus Snape. Once Lily's friendship was lost to him, did he just throw himself coldly, calculatingly, into a bid for power as a Death Eater? Did all he have left was his work? Always realizing that he would never get over her, having this empty feeling continuously gnawing at his soul? And no matter what triumphs and victories he might achieve on the Dark Side, nothing he did could give him lasting happiness. And maybe he thought to himself that this was the worst it could possibly get, to live a life devoid of any passion, only this playing of a game, and while the magic might give him ephemeral joy, the emptiness afterwards was always worse.

Maybe he could seek small solace in the fact that at least there was someone like Lily in the world, someone who could see something noble inside him, someone who tried to bring out the best in him, someone who had actually once cared about him. Maybe that little scrap of sentiment was enough, however pathetic it was.

But just when he thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, it did. Not only was Lily destroyed by Voldemort, but he even became an indirect reason for it, when he relayed Trewlaney's prophecy. He might as well have torn out his own soul and cut it up into little pieces to be blown into the wind. How many days, weeks, months, did he feel that cold, emptiness weighing down at the pit of his stomach. How many times did he replay all his memories over and over again, knowing it was all in vain, knowing that nothing he could do could ever make things right again? Awash in this numbing realization, perhaps he floated right through those meetings with the other Death Eaters, not really all there, his heart trapped entirely in his self-misery. He played his part as a spy like a puppet, an empty, hollow shell of a man.

One day maybe, he no longer felt a damned thing. Just utter numbness. He thought nothing of it. He had stopped thinking of either past or future, merely reacting to the present as it unfurled itself.

Until the day he saw her eyes again, borne by her son, and unravelling all the careful defenses he had laid around his heart like the hundreds upon hundreds of foldings of Masamune's swords.

The fits of rage and passion that he is caught up in are not characteristic of a skilled occlumancer. And even worse, faces from his unhappy past are dredged up back to haunt him. Remus Lupin. Sirius Black. And while Harry Potter has his mother's eyes, he also has his father's looks and manner about him.

Alan Rickman does an excellent job with portraying the anguish roiling inside this character, all while trying to hold it in. When I first read the books, I didn't think he really fit the role. But I guess he is a talented actor, and the character came to fit him anyway.

And while he still is cold, calculating, and unflappable, there are significant moments that betray him.

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I wonder, was he like Sydney Carton, believing that no further good could possibly come out of his life, and that his eventual destruction would actually be a good outcome? Did he believe that there was no further possible hope for happiness in this life, and that all he could do was see this thing through, and—whether he failed or succeeded—reach the end of it all?

Or was he like Iñigo Montoya, fixated only in achieving vengeance or at least die trying, not even thinking at all of what might happen afterward? Live or die. Same difference. No point in thinking about it until this thing is completed.

Particularly with the way Rickman plays him, Snape does not seem like the kind of guy who has big plans after this whole Lord Voldemort thing blows over, who thinks of maybe buying a small place up in the mountains to get away from it all once in a while, and maybe invest a little in a few bluechips to squirrel something away for retirement. In many ways, he's like a dead guy who just hasn't stopped moving yet. He lives and breathes, but the soul is just evaporated, burnt out, nuked.

Why is it that I know this character all too well?

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When you're in excruciating pain and unending torment, the cessation of these sensations can mean one of two things. (1) Whatever it was that was hurting you has stopped, and you can now get up and get on with your life or (2) you are so badly damaged that you can't even feel pain anymore, and it's only a matter of time until the final darkness comes to take you away. When you get right down to it, I suppose I would rather suffer and have some hope for joy, than be numb and unfeeling. The days where I don't feel a goddamn thing are the worst days. When I feel enough to want to weep and feel sorry for myself, at least I know I'm still alive. Otherwise, it's like being trapped in a waking nightmare, unsure of whether you're really there or not, and not giving a damn either way.

Today, for some reason, I had an acute attack of "I want to live" but I'm afraid I've spent way too much time setting myself up for a Byronic fall from grace to call it quits now. For the longest time (for the last nine years at least) I've been convinced that it's all over, and nothing good is ever going to happen to me again, and the best I can hope for is to bask in the reflected glow of other people's triumphs and milestones, and maybe someday I might die a meaningful and heroic death. While this fate may still be true, and I'm not holding my breath to wait for the universe to prove me wrong, I suddenly got the urge to want to jump off of this fasttrack to oblivion.

I want to get over it. Suddenly, I want to cash out and buy into the American Dream. Buy myself a house with at least 15% down in some upscale, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Make myself a little money, maybe buy myself a nice car. Maybe even find myself a trophy wife. It's not love. It's not kismet. But it would be human. I could actually join the human race. You know, talk to women like I wasn't some kind of freakish outcast, some diseased pariah who had no place in human discourse.

I mean, if E.T. can win the hearts and minds of Americans, why can't I?

And then reality slowly rebounds, springing back at me like a deformed mattress, and I wonder to myself, can I really reverse a decade old death wish now? You know, throw the whole thing in reverse? Somehow make up for lost time and repair the stunting of my wounded soul?

I have never been an optimist, and I'm going to be hard pressed to start being one right now.

But: Why not? Whatever isn't expressly forbidden by the Laws of Physics is always theoretically possible.

To quote Charles Bukowski: "If you don’t have much soul left and you know it, you still got soul."

I'm not dead yet, and with any luck, I won't be any time soon. Here's to hoping.

I find it ironic when I think of who exactly got me to start reading the Harry Potter series in the first place. But that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

I am once again obsessed by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I keep ruminating about the relationship between Severus Snape and Lily Potter. It is also ironic that I didn’t see it coming. I’m so totally into the whole unrequited, tragic love thing, and I love characters who never get the girl, who never even had a chance, and who die hopeless and alone. I can’t believe that I had no clue whatsoever what exactly it was that bound Snape to keep Harry safe, and what made him so trustworthy to Dumbledore. You would’ve thought that I’d’ve been all over it.

It just dawned on me that the whole Severus & Lily subplot is so very Wuthering Heights. As Alyssa deconstructs it, Severus is Heathcliff and Lily is Catherine. The Brontë Blog has more literary analysis (and also compares Harry Potter himself to Jane Eyre.)

(As an excursus, my sister recently told me about a book that is a re-imagining of Jane Eyre, told from Bertha’s point-of-view. Bertha is recharacterized as a woman who comes from a non-Western culture, and what is described as madness in the original book is really just Bertha experiencing (1) a communication barrier and (2) culture shock. Or was my sister just describing The Wide Sargasso Sea?)

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It makes me curious as to what was going through Snape’s mind the entire time. Did he think his life was pretty much over, and that to give his life in protection of Harry was, to paraphrase yet another tragic hero, Sydney Carton, a far, far better thing that he does, than he had ever done? Or was he in it for vengeance against the people who destroyed the one person whom he ever trusted, and whom once actually genuinely cared about him? I can only imagine the black hatred that he must have for Voldemort and the Death Eaters for killing Lily. And like Iñigo Montoya, perhaps he had never really thought of what life could be like once he had achieved his aim. (What’s even better is that he dies probably believing that he may have failed in his only remaining two reasons for living (1) to keep Harry safe and (2) to defeat Voldemort and the Death Eaters. For one thing, Snape died believing that Harry had to really die to be able to beat Voldemort, and in the final analysis, there was good chance that all of his and Dumbledore’s careful planning could end up going horribly wrong, with Voldemort winning after all.)

I really can’t wait until “The Deathly Hallows” hits the silver screen. If it’s done right (and, knowing Hollywood, that’s always a very big “if”), it should totally break my heart.

Wow. This puts a different spin on ”Happy Ending” by Mika.

How much of your destiny is truly predetermined? How much of it is self-fulfilling prophecy? (There are technical terms for these things, I think, except I can’t remember them. Confirmation bias? Forer effect?)

Somewhat sadly and quite pathetically, I’ve come to identify myself with an unusual type of literary protagonist: the hero who doesn’t get the girl. Off the top of my head, there are only really three stories I can think of where this happens unambiguously.

Though I actually have never read it, the first one is Wuthering Heights, in the character of Heathcliff. My friend was reading Wuthering Heights at the time and told me that I reminded her of this character. (Great.) But I actually probably first ran into this character in Michael Penn’s song ”No Myth” which is, naturally, a song about a guy who isn’t able to hook up with the girl that he loves. But I think it definitely ranks up there on the list of obscure literary references made by a pop song. (Interesting bits of trivia: Michael Penn is the brother of the actor Sean Penn, and married the singer Aimee Mann) While this song came out in 1990, the most striking memory I have attached to this song is driving up 880 in Milpitas in 1998, although I don’t particularly remember where I was going.

Another character to which I’ve been likened is Sydney Carton, the doomed alcoholic barrister who falls hopelessly in love with Lucy Manette, and for whom he eventually sacrifices his life for. I didn’t read this book until my junior year in college, during a trans-Pacific plane trip to the Philippines. My sister had just read it for high school at the time. What struck her about the character was the aura of wasted potential that clung to this character.

Lastly, and perhaps less literary, is Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series. The love of his life, Lily Evans, ends up marrying a guy Severus totally hates, James Potter. Lily is eventually murdered by the Dark Lord Voldemort, providing the driving force for Snape’s hidden-yet-unwavering opposition to the bad guys, although he is eventually killed as well (for what I feel were rather arbitrary reasons, but I guess an author has got to do what an author has got to do when a deadline is looming.) He kind of combines the increasing bitterness and vengefulness of Heathcliff driven by losing the woman he loves first to marriage to a rival, and then to death, with Sydney Carton’s aura of wasted potential, total despair and wanton self-sacrifice, dying what seems to me, a meaningless death, since he does not get to find out that Voldemort was successfully vanquished and that Harry actually lives.

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When I first read the dénouement to Snape’s subplot, I was astonished. Here was an actual character who could hold the torch for a lost love some 15+ years after the fact, and who ends up dedicating his entire life in memory of her, without hope or ambition of ever finding love again. As far as he was concerned, it seemed to me that he considered his life pretty much over. Finally. A character that I could relate to!

The astonishment soon turned into a mild depression, with the realization that the probability of me dying alone and unloved is pretty high, and ever increasing with time, and while it doesn’t seem like a good way to go, I’m in no mood to really do anything about it. It is, to put it bluntly, fucking hopeless.

But then again, there are far worse things in life than to be alone and unloved. For some unknown reason, the depression managed to snap a few days ago. While nothing has changed with regard to my non-existent love life, there seems to be something that has changed in my perspective.

My current attitude seems to range somewhere between “oh well” and “I don’t give a fuck.” I haven’t exstinguished hope entirely, but I’m pretty much gearing myself up for a continued solitary existence for however many more years I may have left. (I am utterly convinced that I am going to die young, for pointless reasons, and in quite possibly a violent manner.) Odds say, given my personal and strong family history of depression, anxiety, and just general insanity, I am most likely to end my life in suicide. Still, you can never rule out the random drunk driver going the wrong way on the freeway. Or early-onset coronary artery disease, the way my diet is. Suicide by hamburger. What a way to go.

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Then I read about this metaphor about life, and I have to say, “Yeah. That’s it.”

Life. You do with it what you can. The faster your realize the things you can’t or won’t do, the less time you waste living with regret. I guess. Something like that.

It’s ironic, really. While I have thoroughly enjoyed the Harry Potter series for the past 7 years (I was gifted the first three books in 2000), I never really held it in high regard, especially in terms of literary merit. To me, it was the fantasy equivalent of a romance novel: lots of fun to read, but not something you would read again. As I’ve mentioned before, the only books that I’ve managed to read more than once have been The Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, and The Wizard of Earthsea. (Actually, digging around in my memory, there are a few more: some of Madeline L’Engle’s books, in particular A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters; and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy series by Douglas Adams.)

The concept of a supernatural world embedded in our mundanity has been well exploited in literature. Leaving aside comic book heroes, several authors have done good work with regards to magical realism. The most prominent and lyrical to come to mind is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, which takes place in London, where a parallel supernatural world co-exists. He does something somewhat similar in American Gods, where gods from various pantheons roam around American cities. (The action starts off in Chicago, for example.)

Interestingly, I first ran into the concept of pagan gods wandering around modern cities in Douglas Adams’ lesser known Dirk Gently series.

Other examples of this type of magical realism that I’ve read include So You Want to Be a Wizard published in 1982, where a thirteen year old girl finds a library book that instructs her on how to become a wizard, and leads her to a parallel version of NYC. Then there is Tom Holt’s entire series depicting the office of H.W. Wells, a company dedicated to getting supernatural things done. My favorite novel of his, however, is not related to H.W. Wells. Entitled Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?, it describes the reawakening of an entombed Norse king and his champions, who resume their ancient war against the Sorcerer-King, who has managed to become a high-powered CEO ensconced in London.

And in terms of a wizard school, I still feel like not enough credit has ever been given to the Isle of Roke in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea.

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But nevertheless, after reading Deathly Hallows, I am stunned. The character of Severus Snape just leaves me in awe. My heart is seriously breaking. Who’d’ve thunk that what seemed like a throw-away fantasy series would actually generate a character that I can keenly relate to?

Snape seems to exemplify a phenomenon similar to what happened with “Star Wars.” For example, while in the original trilogy (Episodes IV-VI), Luke Skywalker is clearly the main character, it becomes eminently clear by the end of “Return of the Jedi” that the series is really about Anakin Skywalker and his redemption from the Dark Side of the Force, a theme which George Lucas eventually bludgeons his audience with when he came out with the prequels (Episodes I-III.) (It ought to be realized that when “A New Hope” was written, no one had any idea that (1) Lea was Luke’s long-lost twin sister and (2) Darth Vader was actually Anakin Skywalker, the presumed-to-be dead father of the twins.)

In the same way, while the Harry Potter series is ostensibly about, well, Harry Potter, by the end, it becomes clear that the overall plot hinges on Severus Snape and the reasons for his repudiation of the Dark Arts.

We seem to always be intrigued by the anti-heroes, the bad guys who end up doing good. The simplistic way to look at it is that we are people who are intrigued by evil. But a more nuanced way to look at it is that we realize that the most fully formed characters are neither entirely bad or entirely good.

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But what haunts me the most about Severus Snape is his enduring love cum obsession with Lily Potter neé Evans. He had been in love with her since they were like 9 or 10 years old, where apparently they lived in the same neighborhood. She seemed to be his only true friend at Hogwarts, and from the brief snippets that J.K. Rowling cobbles together near the conclusion of the book, it seems that she genuinely cares about him—I suppose in a platonic way—but she nevertheless does love him. Certainly she cares about him more than anyone else ever does, including his parents.

But, I guess, just like Anakin Skywalker, Snape turns to the Dark Side, only Snape realizes his mistake when the Dark Side threatens to harm the woman that he loves. (I seriously cannot wait until 2010 to watch Alan Rickman depict these scenes from the pensieve. I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t be heartrending.)

But Lily is killed anyway, and Snape endeavors for the next 17 years to keep her son safe from harm, in concert with Dumbledore, only to have his actions seemingly become meaningless when Dumbledore reveals to him that Harry must die to vanquish the Dark Lord. And Snape dies without knowing that Good indeed triumphs over Evil.

Who, except for Harry, and except for thousands of adoring fans, will mourn the passing of Severus Snape?

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In the final analysis, it’s kind of pathetic. Here you are, a powerful wizard, mooning over a woman who just doesn’t look at you in that way, and who ends up marrying a guy you can’t stand. And this stays with him for, what, almost 20 years? Living alone in a run-down shack in a sleazy part of town, hated by pretty much all the students at Hogwarts except for the Slytherins, and even they probably fear you more than actually love you, your only friend who ever gave a crap about you dead.

And so you dedicate your entire life to protecting the son of the woman you love, who was your only friend in the entire world, only to die realizing that he has to die anyway. Talk about feeling like a miserable failure.

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But I’m glad that I’m not alone in feeling this way about Snape. Just check out YouTube for all the Severus and Lily tributes, and the heart-felt comments that people have been posting.

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(Oh, but to know, truly and deeply, that you are loved. That someone has a part of their heart staked upon your existence, your triumph, your failures. To know for a fact that, yes, someone actually gives a damn. It’s been a long time. My heart quails at the loneliness yet to come….)

I’m still ruminating about the end of the Harry Potter saga. The mainstream media’s reaction has always interested me. They continue to be bemused by the idea of a novel taking the world by storm, and infiltrating popular culture. Never mind the fact that people were writing “Frodo Lives!” on subway walls 40 years ago, or the fact that “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy was extraordinarily successful, and, as far as wizards go, Gandalf the Grey is as well-known as Merlin, and is arguably the favorite and most-beloved of wizards amongst nerds and geeks world-wide.

I’m not trying to take away anything from J.K. Rowling’s accomplishment. It is not an easy thing to write one book, much less seven. And to have them become extraordinarily popular is a wonderful feat.

A quantitative comparison of the Harry Potter series versus the Earthsea Cycle.

Harry Potter series
by J.K. Rowling
title	page ct
Sorcerer’s Stone	309
Chamber of Secrets	341
Prisoner of Azkaban	435
Goblet of Fire	734
Order of the Phoenix	870
Half-Blood Prince	652
Deathly Hallows	759
TOTAL	4,100

The Earthsea Cycle
by Ursula K. Le Guin
title	page ct
Wizard of Earthsea	192
Tombs of Atuan	192
Farthest Shore	272
Tehanu	288
Other Wind	224
TOTAL	1,168

Contrast this to The Lord of the Rings, which is only a measly 1,216 pages including the Foreword, Prologue, and Appendices.

Sources: amazon.com, wikipedia

But I think that literary debts need to be accounted for. Whether intentional or not, Hogwarts owes a lot to the Island of Roke, the center of Earthsea, which is the world created by the inimitable author Ursula K. Le Guin.

Interestingly, the titular character of the first book, Sparrowhawk, later known as Ged the Archmage, has a lot in common with Harry Potter. Which therefore means he also has a lot in common with Lord Voldemort. In fact, it seems more apt to compare Ged to Voldemort. Both were orphans, both were born with incredible power, both had massive egos, and both screwed around with the Dark Arts. But while Ged learned his lesson about playing with the Dark Side, and with this hard-earned wisdom eventually became the Archmage of Roke, slaying dragons, restoring kingdoms, returning balance to the Force, umm, to the balance, and even settling down with a woman, Voldemort went on to be a ruthless mass-murderer and was generally not a nice guy.

Which brings in another comparison: Anakin Skywalker. I suppose he falls somewhere midway in the continuum. While not an orphan, he was born to pretty crappy conditions, considering that he was a slave. But like Ged and Voldemort, he was born with incredible power. Like Ged (and presumably, like Voldemort), he grew impatient with his Master and felt that he was being held back. Like Ged, this eventually leads him to dabbling with the Dark Side of the Force. But whereas Ged learns the error of his ways, Anakin gives himself up wholly to the Dark Side. But whereas Voldemort dies a wondrously anti-climactic death, still convinced that he was going to win, Anakin redeems himself by showing mercy to his son, and, naturally, in the process, ends up dying.

To go full circle, you could compare Anakin to Severus Snape. Both grew up, again, in crappy conditions. Both were extremely gifted in the Force/in magic. Both (probably) turned to the Dark Side both to escape the fear, ridicule, and distrust of their peers, and probably to win back/save the woman they loved. But whereas Anakin marries Padme, turns to the Dark Side, contributes to the cause of her death, gives himself wholly in service of the Dark Side and the Emperor, then attempts to capture and probably kill, or at least pervert, his kids, Snape loses Lily to James, turns to the Dark Side, contributes to the cause of Lily’s death, but then ends up switching sides completely, giving himself wholly in service to Albus Dumbledore, and attempts to protect the son of the woman he loves. Both are killed by their respective Dark Lords (Anakin by absorbing all that Force Lightning from Palpatine, Snape by getting killed by Voldemort’s pet snake.) And while both end up redeemed, I think Snape gets the raw deal here. Anakin got what he deserved, but Snape just ends up screwed.

(For some reason, finishing Deathly Hallows has only reinforced my belief that I am going to someday die a pointlessly violent death.)

There was a point to this post, but it seems to have eluded me.

I can’t seem to get over Snape’s forlorn and hopeless devotion to Lily. On one hand, it’s really sad and pathetic. On the other hand, it’s heart-wrenchingly awesome.

In a way, the last thing Snape sees before he dies (quite horrifically and with much gore) is Lily’s eyes.

I suppose the thing that really gets me is that I can relate.

Carrying a torch for a lost cause for 10+ years? (And in Snape’s case, it really is a lost cause, considering that the woman he loves is dead.) Sure. It happens. Like I said, it’s sad and pathetic.

Sacrificing your life\xE2\x80\x94not just dying, but giving up your every waking hour as a sacrifice\xE2\x80\x94in the name of your unrequited and yet enduring, impossible-to-quench love? Oh, man.

I can’t wait to watch this part in the movie theaters, in three years or so. I hope they don’t cut it. This entire scene should be perfect.

“You never saw Snape cast a Patronus, did you, Riddle?”

Voldemort did not answer. They continued to circle each other like wolves about to tear each other apart.

“Snape’s Patronus was a doe,” said Harry, “the same as my mother’s, because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from the time when they were children. You should have realized.”

(P.S. No, Harry is not the product of an affair between Snape and Lily Potter.)

I:

“If she means so much to you,” said Dumbledore, “surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?”

“I have—I have asked him—”

“You disgust me,” said Dumbledore…. Snape seemed to shrink a little. “You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want?”

Snape said nothing, but merely looked up at Dumbledore.

“Hide them all, then,” he croaked. “Keep her—them—safe. Please.”

“And what will you give me in return, Severus?”

“In—in return?” Snape gaped at Dumbledore… but after a long moment he said, “Anything.”

II:

“I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter—”

“But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore seriously. “Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?”

“For him?” shouted Snape. ”Expecto Patronum!”

From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe: She landed on the office floor, bounded once across the office, and soared out of the window. Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.

“After all this time?”

“Always,” said Snape.

Because of the release of Deathly Hallows today, I had to catch up and read Half-Blood Prince. One of the reasons why I had decided to put off reading it was because everyone had ruined the “big surprise,” which was the death of Albus Dumbledore.

I suppose the death of the great wizard has been a staple of fantasy for quite a while now, at least ever since Gandalf the Grey plummeted into the trackless depths of Moria, and since Obi-Wan Kenobi met his end from the blade of his former apprentice. (In fact, I almost feel like every fantasy series that has hit the mainstream has been some bizarre hybrid of the ideas of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas: an inconceivably powerful artifact that tethers the Dark Lord to existence in this material plane, a Chosen One meant to restore the balance. But I digress.)

I guess it’s probably just a function of when I read The Lord of the Rings. Even to this day, even though I know that Gandalf the White comes back, I always get a little misty eyed when I read about the Fellowship of the Ring traversing the orc-infested Mines of Moria. I used to feel a little pang of sadness when Obi-Wan Kenobi was cut down by Darth Vader, but unfortunately, George Lucas makes him look decidedly less regal in Episodes I-III that he sort of lost part of his mystique. But when Severus Snape blasts Dumbledore out of the tower, I don’t know, I guess it would’ve been better if I didn’t know.

Still, hands down, the part of The Lord of the Rings that really gets me right there is when Merry has just finished helping Éowyn kill the Witch King of Angmar, and no one seems to notice that he has been deathly injured until Pippin stumbles upon him, and he ends up trying to drag him to the Houses of Healing. Merry ends up asking him, “Are you going to bury me?” and if I’m in the right mood, I can get all teary-eyed.

And now, a spoiler: I just finished Deathly Hallows and Severus Snape’s part in the story was just, wow. He is now definitely my most favorite character in the series, and even though we all know that he’s not the one-dimensional villain that the characters want to believe he is, I was still surprised by how poignant the entirety of his tale is.

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