Heart Acts (WAS Re: HBP: thoughts...)

[tbernhard2000]

Kneasy wrote:
> > It's probably only from now on that not thinking before acting
will become quite literally a fatal error.... Tom at the same age -
Tom was always planning, looking for the edge. Calculation vs emotion.
The emotion tells Harry that instinctively he's right, but he should
have learned from the Sirius debacle that being 'right' emotionally
doesn't guarantee success. In fact it can have disasterous
consequences if you don't do your sums first. 

Aberforths Goat / Mike Gray wrote:
> While it was Harry's emotions that got him into the mess in OoP, it
was Harry's emotions that got him out of it, too.... I *think* she's
trying to say something else: his emotions are there, and there's a
lot of good in them. But they still aren't where they need to be. As
long as he keeps on *hating* people like Snape and Malfoy his bad
emotions are going to keep his good emotions from reaching their full
power.
> Case to point: if Harry had been able to apologize to Snape in OoP,
he might have had a huge breakthrough with Occlumency - and would
never have ended up in the Department of Mysteries. Hence the problem
wasn't that he didn't use his head enough but that he used his heart
the wrong way....I predict that something will happen that we force
him to empathize with one of them, which will lead to a breakthrough.

dan:
These are interesting ideas indeed, at the core of the matter. One
reads the books with a heart's logic, as it were, because that is how
the limited point of view that follows Harry takes us - that is how
Rowling takes us. In all Dumbledore's great investigations, it was
understanding the man Tom Riddle, it was that unrepetative, simple
understanding the person, that he most wanted to know, and teach, and
that lead him to the understanding of how to defeat Voldemort, so he
could pass that on to Harry. And it is understanding Tom, Snape and
Harry that is at the centre of Rowling's project.

It bodes ill for Snape, who maintains an old grudge, assigning the
detention work he did to Harry, for example. No, it wasn't the banal
cruelty of Umbridge, but the humid memory of his own deeper,
unrecorded (except for the deep scar in his brain) trespasses, his use
of the term mudblood to refer to someone who had shown him kindness,
they say, or whom he had admired.

Whatever the task, though, Rowling is intent on showing us how to rise
to meet it. So yes, Potter will have some little understanding - he
already has much, considering his childhood as a mushroom.

If he had been in a state where he could have apologized to the bitter
old coot, perhaps he would have been in a state to have learned
Occlumency. But, would Voldemort have been outed? Would the WW be
informed of the true state of things? Or would Harry still be crying
in the wilderness, and the world told half truths or lies by the
papers and by the minister? What I mean is, the heart's logic says,
this must out. I am not crazy. These things are happening. I will out
them.

That is the path I see in the books.

dan