Apparate to Possess (verging on OT)

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Lyn J. Mangiameli" 
<kumayama at e...> wrote:

>> Back to Neri:
>> Her questions were important because they made the "why didn't 
>> Voldy die and why didn't DD try to kill him?" an official main 
>> mystery of the series.
> 
> Lyn now:
> Did they? It may take a while for us to know. And isn't it odd that 
> the "official main mystery of the series" would be announced in an 
> interview and not made unambigously indicated as such in the story 
> itself.

Maybe it's just me, but hasn't "Why the hell is Harry still alive?" 
*always* been the main mystery of the past?  That's the thing that 
everyone wonders about, Death Eaters talk about at their little get-
togethers (an amusing tidbit per website), and maybe some characters 
know more about than others.  [It would be a major shift in how I at 
least read things if there were deliberate steps taken to prepare a 
sacrificial defense, as has been proposed.]

What is new in JKR's own commentary is not the question itself but a 
different way of framing it--putting it not as "Why is Harry alive?" 
but as "Why isn't Voldemort dead", with her own invocation of the 
killing curse.  That strikes me as her helpful little hint for a 
different way to think about the question that may be illuminating.

For my own part, this is the Big Question that the theorists have 
failed to come up with really good answers for.  I'm personally not 
surprised, as the answer is likely to hinge on one aspect of the 
Potterverse that is the least clear to me: its metaphysics.

What happens when people die?  How are connections between people and 
possession possible?  What is the nature of the soul?  All of these 
are in the class of 'things that I know that I do not know, but I 
know that JKR knows'.  I'm pretty certain she has an absolute answer 
for why Harry lived and why Voldemort didn't die--and I think it will 
be a very revealing one as to the mechanisms of her world.  Hopefully 
it will be well-enough done so as to be elegant and obvious in 
retrospect, but unpredictable from the current standpoint.

We should play a little game: take JKR's interview and website 
comments, tally them up against what actually happens next book and 
the next, and see in how many cases she was outright lying; how many 
she was being semantically sneaky (prophecy doesn't quite count--
she's as much as said that there are tricks of wording hid in there, 
so it's not a shock); and how many times her comments really are 
borne out by at least one fairly straightforward reading of the text.

-Nora, never one to shy away, puts a little money on the "Snape is a 
horrible person" comment falling into the last category