Apologizing to Snape?

[Matt]

No: HPFGUIDX 139383

--- Sherry Gomes wrote:
> i actually felt very bad when Harry looked in that 
> pensieve and sat there saying, no, Harry, don't do that....
> However ... it was implied upthread that Harry should have 
> expressed remorse for what his father had done.  
> Fiddlesticks.  Nobody should have to apologize for the 
> long ago actions of someone else.  Harry did not participate 
> in whatever went on between the marauders and Snape and owes 
> Snape nothing for that.  


I don't think the suggestion was so much an apology as a show of
empathy, something that, frankly, I think Harry was feeling in that
scene in OP.  (Although I must admit I appear to have seriously
misread the scene between Harry and Snape at the end of OP, which I
had thought at the time might signal an emerging detente between the
two, see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/80938.)

When he watched the bullying scene in the Pensieve, Harry surely
realized how it felt to be in Snape's position, because that is the
one -- as Snape himself well knows from the Occlumency lessons -- that
Harry himself had frequently occupied.  If we are speaking purely from
the point of view of a mature morality, Harry should have found an
opportunity to apologize to Snape for sticking his nose into the
Pensieve.  And while he was at it, he could have allowed that, no, he
was not amused by his father's abuse of Snape; he was embarrassed by
it.  The truth would have cost Harry nothing.

-- Matt