Fear and Hope

First, let me make the obligatory sponsor notice: this random Merlin thought is being brought to you by a reading of a chapter from a book one of my professor's is working on the apocalyptic book "4th Ezra" ... for a class with her tomorrow (and thus it is also being brought to you by my persistent procrastination). Anyway, In 4 Ezra 10:38 the angel Uriel says to Ezra "Listen to me, and I will teach you about the things that you fear" Of course, as mentioned in my last post, on my last trip to PA I listened to Prisoner of Azkaban, and so the theme of fear was running through my head anyway, in conjuction with the material from that book (side note: to fans of the Dune series by Frank Herbert, to which Pauli introduced me the year I began a 3 year break from undergrad - I recently put back up on my wall the "fear mantra: "Fear is the mind killer Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration I will face my fear I will permit it to pass over and through me And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear's path Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing Only I will remain") In his conversations and lessons with Harry, Lupin could well speak those same words that Uriel the angel speaks to Ezra "listen to me, and I will teach you, and tell you about the thing that you fear." For example: your boggart is a dementor and this, as a good thing, means that the thing you fear most is fear itself (I would call this a little of an inaccurate phrasing though - if what you fear most is fear itself then you are a Greek stoic - I think what he means is that fear is your biggest concern, including the fear of fear - the point is not to eradicate fear but to work towards not letting fear dominate and control you, again, including the fear of fear itself). But this post is not going to be a big long rambling free-association post as per my usual. What I wanted to put up is one small observation from book 3 on the level of structure. I think there is an intentional pairing of the boggart and the patronus, and I think this primarily based in the concrete language of the text. I think the thought process on this started a while ago when somebody said something about Hermione's boggart and I went back and checked the scene in the first class with the boggart in the wardrobe and thought "that must person must be off their rocker ... Hermione doesn't face the boggart." Fortunately I did not say such a rude thing ... because I was flat-out wrong. In listening to the book again I saw that Hermione faces the boggart in a wardrobe as part of Lupin's DADA final exam ... and there it is indeed (as whoever had been commenting said ... and as Ron conjectured earlier in the book) McGonnegal tearing up her work with failing grades. The specific connection that pairs the boggart and patronus (fear and hope) in opposition to, but also, in the self-same relation, in intimate connection with, each other is the possessive pronoun "your" ("your boggart/patronus") or the possessive "so and so's boggart/patronus." I had not really noticed it before, but the boggart and the patronus are spoken of in exactly the same way in the books (and I do mean plural "bookS" - of course patronuses [actually good Latin would be "patroni" ... but whatever] are mentioned all the way through all the following books, but the boggart is specifically used again in book 5 with Mrs Weasely's boggart ... that was a really gripping scene too; Rowling is SO good at writing pathos that just sort of steals your breath in a quick punch). I think the significance of the pairing is that both things call on and project something, in the one case our greatest fear, and in the other our greatest hope. To return to that thing of not being dominated by fear, even the fear of fear itself ... hope is not hope without a fear to hope against. Anyway, just another random thought from the brain-pan of Merlin as he bounces back and forth between procrastination and feigned diligent study. See you in the funny pages ...