[HPforGrownups] Re: Mirror of Erised (was: About the gleam of triumph...)

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 58929

On Thu, 29 May 2003 yellows at aol.com wrote:

> Now I'm thinking this one through a little further, and I'm wondering
> some more about the mirror charm. I, of course, am away from my book
> right now, so I can't look it up easily, but the way I remember it was
> that Quirrell wanted the stone so that LV could use it. Did he want it
> for himself at all? If he didn't want to use it himself, why wouldn't he
> be able to find the stone right away?

Even if Quirrel did not intend to produce the elixir of life for his own
use, he still wanted to get the stone and present it to Lord Voldemort to
curry favor with his master.  So he *did* want to use the stone (to
improve his standing with LV), just not for its most obvious purpose
(living forever).  What he wants to use it for is irrelevant; that he
wants to use it at all is what matters.  Because he wanted to use the
stone for something, he could not get it out of the mirror.

----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"