The perils of immortality (Was: Harry's Protection)

[iris_ft]

No: HPFGUIDX 119298


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" 
<justcarol67 at y...> wrote:
 > 
> Evidently Nicholas Flamel and his wife, who denied themselves the
> chance to die for over six hundred years, evidently saw the error 
of
> their ways and gave up earthly existence for something better. (All
> this sounds vaguely Christian, of course, but JKR is a Christian,
> though not a fundamentalist, and clearly the soul and the life of 
the
> soul are important to her and to the book. that being the case,
> *earthly* immortality would not be a good thing. It would eliminate
> the possibility of ever passing beyond the Veil and entering "the 
next
> great adventure."
> 
Iris now:

JKR is not only a Christian. She is also someone who had to face the 
loss of a beloved person, her own mother. I've always wondered if 
there was a tie between her decision to write Harry's story the way 
she did, and the loss of her mother.
Hmmm, that's rather difficult to explain. When you loose people you 
love, particularly if their death comes after a long agony, there's 
always a moment when you wish you could stopper time, so you could 
perhaps stopper death. Or you wish they could turn time, so maybe 
everything would be different, or more precisely, wouldn't change in 
your own life.
Indeed, death is not "the next great adventure" only for the one who 
is about to pass "beyond the veil". 
It's also "the next great adventure" for the ones who remain alone. 
It is a huge change; sometimes it is like a true cataclysm. When 
somebody dies, necessarily the persons who remain "facing the veil" 
see their life change more or less completely. And that's a scary 
perspective, because they are not prepared. 
See how what's "coming next" is problematic to most of us, even if 
it's not as important as death. We spent our time looking anxiously 
at tomorrow, trying to know, to determine what it will be. It part 
of our human condition. And we generally don't like changes too much 
(I'm not talking about changing the way you look or the colour of 
the wall paper in your living room; I'm talking about changing from 
a spiritual point of view). Changing is not always a very 
comfortable situation, even if it happens to be finally a good 
thing. And death is the kind of definitive change that makes you 
feel weak and helpless.
You feel weak and helpless when you face a sudden death, or when you 
face a long agony. 
You feel weak and helpless when you face the perspective of your own 
death, because whatever you believe in, you don't know what's beyond 
the veil.
And I think JKR felt weak and helpless when her mother died; I think 
she wished she could stopper time, stopper death. Just the kind of 
thing Voldemort tries to do. Voldemort doesn't want to die, and he 
doesn't want to change, at least, spiritually. He's like 
a "spiritual still life".
He's completely mistaken; he didn't understand or he didn't want to 
understand that change was at the same time inevitable and 
necessary. That's why he refers to an ideology (Salazar Slytherin's) 
that denies precisely the benefit change can provide the wizard 
society with. Slytherin didn't accept to teach muggle born students 
because it sounded like a revolution, because it would change the 
wizard society. He was afraid of change; and so does Voldemort when 
he claims he is his heir. 
 I don't know if I'm relevant, but I think that when JKR presents 
Voldemort's quest for immortality as a bad thing, she tries to 
exorcise what she felt when her own mother died. She makes Voldemort 
try to do what she was unable to achieve, and turning his thirst of 
immortality into an evil behaviour, making him fail, she gives 
herself the possibility to accept that she was unable to avoid what 
happened.  
But there's also one thing you can notice when you have to face 
someone's death: you finally find the way to go on, and sometimes 
you discover in your heart, in your mind, strengths you didn't even 
suspect. You survive. Just like Harry. 
He survives because he changes and doesn't see it as a calamity; or 
at least he tries to accept it, even if it opens the perspective of 
his own loneliness, of his own death, like at the end of OotP.
JKR decided to choose a child as the hero of her books because 
that's the kind of person who can't avoid changes. Harry is an 
amazing summary of what people(the author, her readers) have to 
accept: he's a survivor, waiting for the moment of his own death.
I can hear you say that it is a very sad and pessimistic portrait. 
Well, not at all; it's simply realistic. We all are survivors, 
considering our anxious reflection in a mirror. And we all know that 
we will have to die soon or later. Accepting it, trying to live as 
well as we can, maybe that's what makes a mind being "well prepared".
What Dumbledore tells Harry at the end of the first book could be 
what JKR would have liked to be told herself when her mother died. 
Being "a well prepared mind" could be at the same time facing your 
own loneliness (just like Harry does after learning how his mother 
died), and accepting the fact that you are not going to live forever.
Of course, it's not easy at all.
I don't know if it is possible to face death serenely; personally, I 
can't.
But though it's very hard; though we feel weak, helpless, and 
afraid, we are here, and we go on, and we try to do for the best. 
And sometimes, we are lucky enough to find an artist to help us 
understand we are not that alone. 

Just my opinion of course,

Amicalement,


Iris