You can't always get what you want, but sometimes ... you get what you need: Mirror bookends in Harry Potter

This is just a short one. I was just digging around in my travel bag in terrible need of some dental floss and noticing how much my travel bag (full of bandaids, old shaving, razors, a salve or two) amazingly resembles the state of Harry's trunk at the beginning of Deathly Hallows. I haven't yet found the floss and so am running to the corner drugstore, but I did notice I have a shaving mirror in there, and that reminded me of the two way mirror in DH ... and that started a thought rolling. In book 1 we have the mirror of Erised, which is of course "desire" spelled backwards, and shows the viewer the deepest, most secret and most desparate desires of their heart. In Book 7 we have the broken fragment of the mirror Sirius gave Harry. I would say that this latter could be seen as paired off against the Mirror of Erised as, rather, that which gives you what you need ... in particular in book 7 it is the path by which Harry reaches Aberforth and Aberforth sends rescue. I would even say that the broken mirror is sort of bookended itself in book 7. When Harry first sees the flash of blue in the beginning he thinks about what he desires ... to see and talk to Dumbledore again. and in the end of the book, with the second flash, when he is making no assumptions based in his longings, but simply crying out into the unknown (perhaps a symbol of the transcendant), then something happens. Of course there is also a possible death theme here - Harry is pining for DD, who has died and cannot be brought back, just as he pined for his family in the Erised mirror in book 1 ... and when the second mirror sends Dobby and Dobby saves them, he also dies. I would note two other things about the pairing (and here I am just tossing out associations that I don't necessarily have tied out ... but do seem rather promising to me). 1. The useful mirror is the one that is broken; the one which could trap you into wasting your life pining is the one that is "whole" 2. Communication: The mirror in book 7 is designed for communication whereas the mirror of Erised is not (in fact it implicitly, as told in the story, has anti-communicative qualities - namely that neither Ron nor Harry can see what each other see in the mirror). Here also there is a possible death theme in that in Book 5 Harry looks at the mirror, knowing he will not Sirius in it but still sort of hoping, the same as he does with the blue eye of (a) Dumbledore in book 7. In the end however, it is the blue eye that saves ... maybe there is a theme here of not trying to pin the dead down so that, who knows, they may be something involved when you cry out into unknown/transcendant for help (the shades from Voldy's wand in book 4 would seem to support this type of thinking - and if JKR has in fact done time in the chair and/or on the couch, as it seems from the language and imagery in many of the books, and supported by some information from public record on her life ... getting closure from the dearly departed is a very important theme there ... it is what frees one to really remember departed loved ones, as opposed to just being haunted by them [or rather our conceptions of them, how we perhaps tried to pin "them" down while they lived], and that is important for being able to grieve properly) ... but I think this would all be pretty latent stuf, a lot more of a psycho-analytic subconsicous reading of it. PS The mirror of Erised shares some qualities with the compass of Jack Sparrow as it gets developed in the second PotC movie - it shows you what you desire most in this world (in the first movie it is implied only that it shows the bearings to Ille de Meurta, but the screen writers said they felt they, fortunately, left enough ambiguity in the phrasing to make the transition possible). The settings are different, however. In Dead Man's Chest the problem is a person not knowing what they want ... which is a more "psycho-analytic" problem of things like the ego (in the Freudian system of Id, Ego, Super-ego) sublimated to an unhealthy level (among other things) etc