Your Boggart

[sarvalsha at dellnet.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 1096

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "lrcjestes" <lrcjestes at m...> wrote:
> 
> >
> > What would YOUR boggart look like?
> >
> 

My immediate reaction was a dementor. It's that wretched, frightening 
appearance linked to an even more frightening ability to suck every 
source of joy from a person's life that I find scary. But when 
someone else mentioned the fear of poverty, my mind ran to things 
like fear of looking stupid, fear of failure, and the related fear of 
success. But I think I will stick with the dementor. Being denied my 
memories, happy or otherwise, is a very frightening thought. 

Does anyone else remember a Warren Beatty movie called Heaven Can 
Wait? I absolutely loved that movie . . . right up until the end when 
they put the character into his permanent substitute body . . . 
without any memory of who he was. Totally spoiled the movie for me. 
But at least that character had the opportunity to build new happy 
memories. 

In any case, having the dementor as your boggart doesn't necessarily 
mean the dementor itself is your worst fear. Remember how Lupin 
reacted when Harry told him he had thought of the dementors instead 
of Voldemort. Lupin didn't take it to mean that Harry was afraid of 
the dementor, but that he was afraid of his own fear of the dementor. 

Another equally interesting question is 'If you looked in the Mirror 
of Erised, what would you see?'. For me a totally unexpected answer 
came unbidden while I was trying to think of an answer logically. 

This is one of the reasons I have become hooked on these books. If 
you read them with intent and intelligence, you end up thinking about 
your own life in new ways. I recommended the first book to someone at 
work whom I didn't know very well. She read it, then told me 'I read 
a lot of fantasy and am used to something more sophisticated'; I 
couldn't help thinking that if she didn't think SS was sophisticated, 
she wasn't paying attention.



Margaret