Snape's worst memory: the Pensieve Scene

[D.G.]

No: HPFGUIDX 68729

Evangelina asked of Snape:
"What do you think a Boggart would turn into to scare him??"

Believe it or not --assuming that a Boggart can tap into the true 
essence of a person's deepest fears and emotions, not only those 
things people convince themselves that they believe or feel-- I'm 
willing to bet that the Boggart would probably turn into the Dark 
Lord himself.

Before you laugh TOO loudly, please try to follow my reasoning:  I 
know that a lot of folks would probably suggest that perhaps his 
parents or his bullying schoomates might be forms for a Boggart to 
take to scare Snape.  After all, from what we know, had a pretty 
miserable childhood and adolescence: he came from an unhappy 
[possibly abusive] home; he was ridiculed and bullied in school.  

Just as alientated, angry adolescent Muggles do (witness Columbine), 
young Servius began to entertain notions of achieving power and 
vengeance through the Dark Forces -- so deep was his bitterness at 
the "respectable" world that he decided to embrace his own alienation 
from it, to embrace everything that that world said was evil or 
wrong, and in so doing empower himself to fight and defeat it.  [I 
know of no evidence that his parents were adepts of the Dark Arts -- 
someone correct me if I'm wrong.] 

But in fact, it was this decision --to follow the Dark Lord-- that  
forever sealed his fate to spend life as a haunted, joyless man, 
consumed with bitterness (and probably guilt), disrusted by almost 
everyone, at home in neither world.  

(Harry, on the other hand, had a childhood at least as miserable as 
Snape's, but through the leavening effect of friendship and love he 
has the chance, at least, to experience true joy and tenderness in 
his life, regardless of what his eventually fate may be.  Of course, 
he has had help in staying the path -- and, by the way, did anyone 
else think that the scene where Harry confronted Sirius and Lupin 
about his father's [and their] unpleasant, bullying ways as 
schoolboys was somewhat tossed-off and unsatisfying, especially given 
its central importance to our understanding of the entire saga?) 

Maybe Snape will emerge, at the very end, as a kind of Lash LaRue of 
Wizardry --a man draped in black, misunderstood and feared as a 
villain, who emerges at the very end as a hero, admired and feted by 
all.  But I doubt it -- I think his inner being has been too damaged 
and scarred by the darkness he's seen [and helped perpetuate] for him 
to be able to step back out into the light and accept love, even for 
good deeds he may yet perform.  Somewhere inside of him, I think, he 
knows that it's Voldemort who sealed him to this fate.

D.G.