A Sockful of Sweets--Was: Re: Albus Dumbledore and the Socks

[msbeadsley]

No: HPFGUIDX 80467

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "sylviablundell2001" 
<sylviablundell at a...> wrote:
> I was quite charmed by Sandy's sweet explanation but wonder if we 
> are all looking for something that isn't there.It seemed to me on 
> reading this passage that DD simply doesn't want to tell Harry what 
> he sees in the Mirror of Erised, and says the first light-hearted 
> thing that  comes into his head.  It does say at the end of the 
> chapter "It was only when he was back in bed that it struck Harry 
> that Dumbledore might nothave been quite truthful.  But then, he 
> thought, as he shoved Scabbers off his pillow, it had been quite a 
> personal question."

> The next thing, of course, is to speculate exactly what DD did see 
> in the Mirror if it wasn't socks. Sylvia (who really likes Sandy's 
> theory, after all the ghastly things that have been happening in 
> Harry's world and our own)

Good point.  The obvious (Occam's razor again) explanation is, of 
course, that Dumbledore simply put Harry off with a whimsical answer 
(like a teacher of Eastern disciplines using a koan to unstick an 
accolyte's thinking). It's the one Harry is inclined to believe and 
the one suggested to us, the readers, because he thinks so.  If 
that's true, then the "next thing" to me is *still*: why then socks?  
(Rather than going right to speculation about what DD *did* see; we 
don't know that he ever looked into the Mirror at all.)  Did 
Dumbledore say socks just to trivialize Harry's question?  Just 
because socks aren't relevant to much of anything?  Actually, I 
tended to keep digging because I think that Dumbledore is cleverer 
than that.  I think Harry (as I said before) surprised the truth out 
of Dumbledore; and still it was phrased in a way which made it 
impenetrable to Harry.

My interpretation was something that kept surfacing in my mind; parts 
of what I said about it didn't come together until after OoP, but the 
gist of it, that the socks would represent a safer, more 
peaceful, "sweeter" world to Dumbledore, occurred to me a long time 
ago.

IN DEFENSE OF SWEETNESS

The saga *started out* after all with a great deal of sweetness 
(Harry forms a friendship with Ron over Chocolate Frogs) without 
being (an aside:  I've been an Anglophile forever and love all the 
British variants) treacly.  Isn't Dumbledore known for his love of 
confections?  Isn't fighting Voldemort as much about how he takes the 
sweetness out of life and makes it not worth living (think 
Longbottoms, and there's *another* reference to sweets with the 
Droobles) as it is about moral stances?  I wonder how sweet Death is 
to eat?  I'd imagine it's rather bitter.  The places the story has 
become less sweet (as Sylvia says, "the ghastly things that have been 
happening in Harry's world") it has been a result of Voldemort's 
doings; even Harry's first *romance*, with Cho Chang, comes apart 
because his girl can't stop crying about her former boyfriend, the 
one Voldemort murdered (yeah, I know, Peter held the wand); not to 
mention what widened the gap:  Cho's friend ratted out Harry's 
efforts to make people safer--from Voldemort.  What kept Harry at the 
Dursleys, a place where life had almost no sweetness, for his first 
eleven years?  Voldemort.  Think back to LOTR; The Shire represents 
all that is sweet and good and simple in the world, and it is the 
place Gandalf worries for most as Sauron comes back to power.  
Sweetness is what we're fighting for.  If we lose sight of that, if 
we lose the ability to appreciate a good sherbet lemon drop, we've 
given in.  Sauron, or Grindelwald, or Voldemort, or whoever it is, 
wins.  We might as well each hold a house party and invite the 
dementors.

I am poised here on the edge of going on and on ad nauseum; probably 
a good place to stop.  Comments?

Sandy, aka "msbeadsley" stowing soapbox *again*