Path of Liberation

[D.G.]

No: HPFGUIDX 68989

Lixcrosssmith wrote:

On the other hand, we have good old Snape who is the other extreme.  
He's the intellect who believes that emotion and love makes one 
weak.  It is no coincidence that he teaches the exacting discipline 
of potions or that he set a logical test as a guard for the 
Sorcerer's Stone.  It is not surprising that Occlumency is something 
he is proficient at.

Me:

Liz, I agree with you about the "balance" thing, but I don't 
necessarily agree that Snape is not driven by emotion (even if he 
might want to believe he is, and even if he's able to suppress the so-
called "weaker" emotions in the name of what he sees as his 
mission).  It seems, to me, that he is very much driven --indeed, 
even consumed-- by bitterness and anger (I'll stop short of calling 
it "hate," at least for the time being).  Those are emotions, as 
well, and --as we can see in Snape's own behavior-- they can cloud 
good judgment as tragically as anthing else possibly can.

That being said, I think it's wise to consider whether Snape's mask 
of hardness and aloofness is a mask he's erected to protect himself 
against his own pain and his own sense of weakness and alone-ness, as 
evidence by his Penseive memories and his irrationally defensive 
reaction to Harry's witnessing of it.

Somehow I can't help but think of the literary personna William 
Burroughs adopted for most of his career --"I am the cat who walks 
alone"-- right down to his flirtations with Black Magic and other 
socially unacceptable practices, right down to the impenetrable death-
mask of stoicism and unemotional rationality he usually affected in 
public, right down to the denial of love itself that he insisted upon 
in many of his writings [he often portrayed it as a psychic virus, 
designed to weaken man's willpower, vistited on mankind by Venusian-
style invaders] ... and Burroughs, by all accounts, was a terribly 
lonely man for most of his life, a man whose stronges bonds were with 
his cats, a man who admitted (late in life) that he often broke into 
tears and cried, all alone in his home, from the unhappiness that 
seared his soul.

Too bad Burroughs isn't still around -- he'd have been the perfect 
man to portray Snape in the movies.