Dementors kiss

[ftah3]

No: HPFGUIDX 41048

Darrin quoted Hagrid from PoA:
> > "Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk
> > this earth. they 
> > infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in
> > decay and despair 
> > they drain peace, hope and happiness out of the air
> > around them. Even 
> > Muggles feel their presence, though they can't see
> > them. Get too near 
> > a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy
> > memory, will be sucked 
> > out of you."

Amy Z then said:
 but
> now that we look at the relevant quotes I think I've
> got it.  Dementors suck happiness out of people.  That
> doesn't mean that happiness is what they live on; it
> may be that what they really live on is the despair
> that results.  <snip>  What I imagine about Dementors--and this
> seems to fit with everything we know about them--is
> that one of their "foods" is precisely this transition
> from happiness to despair.

I agree that Dementors don't feed on the happiness that is 'sucked' 
out of people by their presence, but I don't think that they feed on 
the transitory effluvia (er, so to speak) either.  I think that what 
they feed on is despair, and that's it.

Imho, the spin Hagrid's description of a Dementor's effect on people - 
that they suck 'every good feeling, every happy memory...out of you' - 
is possibly misleading.  Hagrid is trying to explain what he felt, but 
I don't think he's necessarily describing the how the Dementors feed 
off of humans.

My own opinion is based on how Harry is affected.  I don't have the 
book with me and can't quote, but when Harry is around Dementors, the 
main effect isn't that happiness is sucked out, but that the depths of 
his despair are plumbed and unhappiness is brought to the fore.  I 
think it's an important distinction.  Hagrid says that when he was 
around the Dementors he remembered all the sad things that happened, 
which is reasonable for someone who has had happiness sucked out of 
him.  But is it reasonable that memories buried so deep, memories 
originally collected by an infant who wouldn't have necessarily 
comprehended events as coherently as Harry eventually remembers them, 
would be more and more clearly expanded upon in Harry's consciousness 
simply because he was overwhelmingly sad?  He has plenty of unhappy 
things at the fore of his memory, if all that was needed was something 
to fill the void left by sucked-away happiness.

Also, it's my opinion that when the Dementors came onto the Quidditch 
field, Harry wasn't imagining things when he looked down and saw all 
of them staring up at him.  I think that the Dementors weren't drawn 
to the field by all of the human emotion present due to the crowds (as 
is put forth by another character), but that they were drawn to the 
field because Harry was there.  I think that the Dementor who 
connected with Harry on the train felt that he, as Lupin points out, 
had particularly horrible memories and emotions buried in him, that to 
that Dementor Harry must have stood out like...the smell of baking 
bread to a hungry man who thought he'd stumbled into a deli that only 
served unflavored rice cakes.  And that Dementor (sort of like ants 
do) passed on this experience; and when Harry, emotions high, flew in 
that Quidditch game, which is outside the boundaries of the school 
buildings, the Dementors were drawn to *him*.

This is also why I think they attempted to administer the Kiss on him. 
 How could they resist a feast of despair?  (Incidentally, this is 
also why I agree with Dumbledore that they're more dangerous than 
Fudge thinks they are - imho by their sort of stalking of Harry I 
think they have shown that their first goal is to feed, regardless of 
rules or of innocence or of the age of the victim.)

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I think the Dementors made a 
special target of Harry, and the main difference between Harry and 
anybody else is that he has, beneath the usual bad memories and human 
unhappinesses, a wellspring of tragic experience just waiting to be 
pulled to the surface and consumed.  So as far as sucking away the 
happiness - think of a volcano growing by the welling up of lava from 
the ocean floor: when it breaks through the surface and forms an 
eventual island, it's not there because the water was taken away and 
the lava rose to fill the void; rather it's there because it displaced 
the lava.  Just like the despair dragged forth to be consumed by the 
Dementors displaces the happiness.

...at any rate, that's my theory.  %-)

Mahoney