JKR's dealing with emotions - Talking about Death

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 147584

Shaun wrote:  
> Well, from my reading of that passage. Dumbledore is not saying that
Harry's amount of love is unusal or the degree of love that Harry is
capable of is at all unusual. What he is saying is that given Harry's
experiences it is surprising he still has this the normal love that
other people have. <snip>
even if Dumbledore is right though, I still don't see any signs that
Harry is any more loving than the next person in the novels. He seems
to simply be a fairly normal boy capable of fairly normal love. <snip>
> 
> I think he has a heightened sense of justice, and perhaps in some
ways a heightened sense of duty - this to me is his 'saving people
thing' and that may have some link to a form of love. <snip>

Carol responds:
I agree that there's an apparent conflict between Dumbledore's
absolute certainty that Harry's capacity makes him unusually, if not
uniquely, qualified to defeat Voldemort and what we see of Harry's
actual capacity to love, which seems quite normal (despite his
upbringing by the Dursleys), but not exceptional. He makes a few close
friends and is on good terms with a few others, he develops a strong
attachment to his mostly absent godfather, he has a "saving people"
thing, he develops an adolescent crush or two. But it's his mother's
love that saves him at Godric's Hollow and from Quirrell!mort and his
parents' love (in the form of the shadows in the wand) that saves him
from LV in the graveyard. It's his loyalty to DD, rather than some
form of quasi-fraternal love, that brings Fawkes to him in CoS. And
the love of his godfather that saves him from possession in OoP is a
very fierce sort of love, a willingness to die to be with Sirius
rather than continue to endure the pain of Voldemort's hated presence.
Unless that incident foreshadows some sort of willingness to sacrifice
himself, it's hard to see how it will help him to overcome LV in
battle. (It's good, though, that he's unlikely to be possessed again.)

The "saving people" thing could also, I suppose, be regarded as a kind
of impersonal love (he didn't even know little Gabrielle Delacour, and
he barely knew Ginny in CoS). It seems to me to be a sort of
compulsion to make things better, to fix things, as opposed to talking
about them and understanding them. (Harry wants Cho to be happy; he
doesn't have a clue that she just wants to talk, or that tears are her
way of dealing with grief and she needs to share her feelings and have
him share his.)

It strikes me that Harry has a capacity for very strong feelings, but
the only ones that he recognizes are anger and hatred, and those, IMO,
he nurtures a little too obsessively, which may be why he empathizes
so strongly with "the Prince" before he knows that it's Severus Snape.
But grief he has difficulty expressing, or even akcnowledging, so he
expresses it as anger. And love and affection he feels but never
expresses at all (unless you count kissing Cho and Ginny). He never
tells his friends that he cares about them, never reaches out a hand
to comfort them, never asks how they're feeling. He hasn't been
brought up to do such things. they never even occur to him.

JKR says that Harry has difficulty compartmentalizing his feelings. I
suppose she means that he doesn't analyze them, doesn't attempt to
identify them and sort them out, doesn't, in some cases, even
recognize them. Maybe, if he could transfer all the energy he
currently devotes to hatred and anger into love for the Wizarding
World and for specific people in it, into the passionate desire to
save the Weasleys and Hermione and everyone else he cares about from
Voldemort, he would be what Dumbledore predicted he would be.

He can feel with passionate intensity. But what he's feeling now is
the wrong emotion.

Not a theory, not an explanation, just a few random thoughts on Harry
and Love and the wisdom of Dumbledore.

Carol, hoping that Harry's impartial, sacrificial love will be
replaced by the love of friends and family in the epilogue