Sirius - Pre Azkaban

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

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No: HPFGUIDX C7597
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: Sirius - Pre Azkaban
Reply To: [Yahoo! #7320] Sirius - Pre Azkaban
Date: 8/22/00 11:29 pm  (ET)

> "I can tell you with absolute honesty that I am not married, never
have been, never quite grasped the concept of that institution."

Based entirely on my own arrogant speculation, I don't think that is
quite right. Sirius was James's best friend, closer than brothers, and
therefore became as close to Lily as brother and sister, and thus spent
years close to people who were acting like living evidence of Plato's
metaphor about love.

I forget which of Plato's dialogues it is, but he had his Socrates
character tell the story that once upon a time, humans each had four
legs, four arms, two heads, and two sex organs, and they reproduced by
dispersing their gametes on the ground (like some dry land version of
salmon). But the gods saw that these humans were too clever, too brave,
and increasingly powerful, and became afraid that the humans would attack
Mt. Olympus and conquer the gods. So Olympian Zeus solved the problem by
crippling the humans by cutting them all in half. Since then, us humans
are been pathetic creatures each with only two arms, only two legs,
only one head, only one sex organ, a deep feeling of incompleteness
(which is similar to inadequacy), and a low instinctive drive to seek
and find and join with one's own true other half. Plato had it that all
sex and romance were attempts to find and join with that other half.

I'm not assuming that Sirius ever read Plato, but I do believe that
he eventually figured out why James, despite still having his eyesight
and sense of aesthetics, never wanted to cheat on Lily, explaining it
something like: "Those two are like two halves of one person. And the
right half of a person never wants to go off and live separate from the
left half.... Now, me, I am a complete person who doesn't need an extra
half-person, and independence is what suits me best (but, his thoughts
whisper, I wonder what it feels like to meet one's own true soulmate;
I can't even imagine it, but it must feel very good judging from how
happy James and Lily are)."

Sure, it's been a lot of years and hard times since then and he doesn't
remember ever wondering about soulmates (not even when trying to stop
thinking about Cordelia), but

> "I can tell you with absolute honesty that I am not married, never
have been,

if he is speaking with absolute honesty

> never quite grasped the concept of that institution."

he would have to say something like: "marriage made sense for James
and Lily because they were like two halves of one person, but it
always seemed to me that marriage for everyone else was more like tying
themselves together to run a three-legged race: unnatural, inefficient,
and eventually very annoying."

Do wizard folk know from three-legged races?