Mental Discipline in the WW: A Comparison (was:Snape the Zen Master...)

[madam_marozi]

No: HPFGUIDX 130366

> >>Betsy Hp: 

> A happy memory is 
> never described.  And Harry doesn't say, I did it because I finally 
> figured out a strong happy memory, he says he did it because he
knew 
> he'd already done it.  Of course it's contradictory -- it's Time 
> Travel (tm), creator of contradiction headaches and unsolvable 
> paradoxes the world over <g>.  But it's the paradox that allows 
> Harry to finally produce a Patronus.  

Madam M: 

But Harry actually first produced a corporeal Patronus at the 
Quidditch match vs. Ravenclaw.  He himself was too focused on the 
snitch to notice:

"He didn't stop to think.  Plunging a hand down the neck of his
robes, 
he whipped out his wand and roared, 'Expecto patronum!' Something 
silver-white, something enormous, erupted from the end of his wand.  
He knew it had shot directly at the dementors but didn't pause to 
watch" (US pb 262).

But Lupin and Dumbledore both saw Prongs clearly enough:

"'That was quite some Patronus,' said a voice in Harry's ear.  Harry 
turned around to see Professor Lupin, who looked both shaken and 
pleased" (263).

"'Prongs rode again last night...Last night Sirius told me all about 
how they became Animagi,' said Dumbledore, smiling...'And then I 
remembered the most unusual form your Patronus took, when it charged 
Mr. Malfoy down at your Quidditch match against Ravenclaw'" (428).

The difference between the two instances when Harry produces a 
corporeal Patronus and the occasions where Harry only produced 
incomplete Patroni (practice with Lupin and his first attempts to 
protect Sirius by the lake) is that in the latter instances, the 
process is described: We see Harry select a happy memory and 
consciously attempt to apply it.  

Time-traveling Harry, on the other hand, as in the Quidditch match, 
operates automatically.  We don't see a happy memory referred to, but 
that doesn't mean there isn't one making the charm work, just that 
Harry is not consciously aware of it.  He's not overthinking things, 
just letting what he has practiced function as second-nature.

In this way learning magic seems less a conventional intellectual 
discipline and more akin to music: you practice again and again so 
that, in concert, you don't have to think about which note comes 
next.  Or athletics:  baseball players practice, but no one ever hit
a 
home run by *thinking* about when to swing the bat.  So the "hit'em 
over and over" technique, which both Lupin and Snape use, seems to be 
an appropriate one for teaching defensive magic.  And it wasn't 
completely unsuccessful in Snape's case;  Harry did try to fight
Snape 
out of his mind, and managed a couple of partial successes.  But the 
lessons stopped before he had progressed far enough.