Pensieves objectivity AND: Dumbledore's integrity

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 79719

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "kiricat2001" 
<Zarleycat at a...> wrote:
 I 
> know, I know, Dumbledore had to stay away from Harry  so 
Voldemort wouldn't find out when strolling through Harry's mind 
that the good  guys had figured out about the connection 
between Harry's mind and  Voldemort.  But, Dumbledore could 
have had Remus or Moody or  McGonagall be the one to talk to 
Harry alone to explain all of this,  and also explain why Snape 
has to be the one to teach Harry.  <

Er, maybe I'm dense, but how does Harry getting the information 
from Remus or Moody instead of Dumbledore make it any more 
difficult for Voldemort to glean it from Harry's mind?  It's Harry's 
mind that's unsafe, not Dumbledore's.

And this idea that Dumbledore had no understanding of what 
Sirius was going through...where does that come from? Well, 
that's what Harry thinks, "Dumbledore, who had plainly not 
understood Sirius at all, how brave he was, how much he had 
suffered..." 

But Harry is a fifteen year old boy, and youth, as Dumbledore 
says, often does not understand age. One thing that Harry does 
not understand in this case, I think, is how much of his own 
feelings of isolation and hostility he is projecting onto Sirius.

 Dumbledore did not  *make* Sirius stay at Grimmauld Place. 
Sirius was  an adult, free to leave at any time. He wouldn't have 
stayed if he hadn't understood the reasons that Dumbledore 
wanted him to do it.  He does grumble about Dumbledore's 
orders occasionally, but all soldiers do that.

Certainly Sirius suffered at Grimmauld Place, but is there any 
reason to think he was suffering as much as Harry imagined? 
There is this feeling on the list that Sirius ended up at the 
Department of Mysteries because he was so stir-crazy with 
being taunted and cooped up at Grimmauld Place that he 
suicidally disregarded the danger he would face. That is illogical. 
Sirius understood the danger well enough, otherwise he 
wouldn't have wanted to rescue Harry in the first place. 

Sirius is a troubled man, but it is a bit of a stretch to conclude he 
must be a mental case because he got a bit drunk and 
dishevelled on Christmas Eve, or because he found it hard to 
endure Harry going back to Hogwarts without him. 

When Harry sees him the last time before the end, in 
Umbridge's fire, there's no indication that Sirius looked worse 
than before. The idea that Sirius had become so desperate that 
he went to Harry's rescue out of a need to prove something is 
purely Harry's fantasy. 

Pippin