Love, Hate, Joy, Despair---the Greatest is Love

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 191034

Potioncat:
> Love is a major theme of the series. It is, after all, Harry's love that saves the WW. JKR shows many types of love throughout her story--and warns about obsessive love.
> 
> What do you, kind readers, think of the different ways JKR depicts love? 
> 
> Is she right, in your opinion? 
> 
> How many examples of love do you see in the book? 
> 
> How does love and joy contrast with hate and despair?


Pippin:
I've had to take some time to think about this. I hope others are too, because this is a fascinating question. 

I think JKR depicts love as the source of courage and hope and the force that turns people's hearts towards one another. The first four books especially show us the good love can do.

Besides the kinds of love others mentioned, there is also the love of the wizards for their craft. Think of Snape rhapsodizing over potions, or of Ollivander speaking of wands, or Dumbledore talking about ancient magic. There's Hagrid with his love for creatures, the weirder the better. Harry loves Quidditch and DADA.

But all along there are also hints of something darker: the Slytherins can be ruthless in their love of power, and Hermione shows us that  Gryffindors can be ruthless in their love of doing good. 

We see all this and we want desperately for our hero, Harry, to fix it. He has the power of love, and love can do anything, right?

In the last three  books, I think JKR has something difficult to say about love: that it doesn't do everything we wish it could do. Like the Mirror of Erised, it will give us neither knowledge nor truth -- and ignorance and false ideals can make the power of love incredibly destructive.  

Selfish characters who love go right on being selfish -- unless something happens to make them see that their selfishness offends or hurts their beloved. It is remorse and not love that is the catalyst for change. But that is a choice -- it is always possible to avoid remorse by blaming the damage on others or refusing to admit that damage is being done. 

Selfish love cannot distinguish the needs of the beloved. Dumbledore needed his family to be happy, in both senses of that phrase. He never wanted to hurt them. But he treated them as an extension of himself: he wanted his brother to continue in school and his sister to have her freedom and it was incomprehensible to him that they neither needed nor wanted those things. 

The Marauders care about Lupin but they don't take his anguish over breaking his promises to Dumbledore or his misgivings over the way they treat Snape seriously. 

Snape loves Lily, always, but again in a very selfish way.

 And we readers, if we love the Slytherins, (and we do! we *do*!)  will be terribly disappointed unless we can learn to love them unselfishly,  as they are, and not as we wished they would be. 

In the barrage of infantile imagery that surrounds the selfish characters we begin to see that they can only love as a baby loves, seeing the mother as an extension of itself and unable to imagine that she has an existence outside the baby's orbit. 

Voldemort was born without the ability to love, or lost it early in life. Harry's blood restored it to him. But it was still a violent and destructive love -- which brings only ruin to his beloved Hogwarts.  

But there is unselfish love, most clearly the love for the dead, who can give  nothing in return except what remains of the comfort and wisdom they gave  in life (although, in the case of wizards, what remains is quite a bit.) 

Harry's love is remarkably unselfish -- to the point where, when he understands his death is necessary to save what he loves, he does not even look for a way to save himself. But  Harry  always loved life more than death, though death has its seductions as the Mirror showed, and he did not give his life away cheaply. 

 It wasn't simply a matter of destroying the horcrux -- and certainly Harry didn't believe Voldemort's promise that if Harry gave himself up, the others would be spared. Voldemort gave Harry a *choice* -- something he rarely allows his victims.  And that made all the difference. It meant that Harry had one chance, a chance that might not ever come again, to do what his mother did, and use his death to cast a spell of protection. 

Pippin