![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Love and hate
Jul. 5th, 2006 05:06 pmDumbledore, in a not-yet-published oneshot:
Harry has not yet learned to step aside from hate, despite his fierce ability to love.
Comment from beta-reader (not intended as a correction):
Harry's ability to love is why he can feel such strong hatred. Don't you think?
I'm trying to puzzle this one out. Yes, I've said previously that I see love and hate as two sides of the same coin - but I was mainly thinking of obsessive love, needy love, love that can turn to hate when its needs aren't met. I had the impression that the love that can enable Harry to beat Dumbledore is of a higher quality, a love that reaches out in connection and is the antithesis of destruction. And in my experience that love cannot coexist with hate.
Perhaps I am wrong in my interpretation of Rowling's work: going back to the passage at the end of OotP, Harry throws off Voldemort when he thinks of seeing Sirius again and his 'heart filled with emotion'. The nature of that emotion is not specified, and arguably it could be a love born from need (of Sirius, of family). But Dumbledore says that Voldemort cannot reside in a body 'so full of the force he detests', and surely that force would not be so detestable if it could be twisted into hate.
Does learning to love selflessly lead to being able to hate more strongly? I can’t see it, myself. But I wonder if other readers might think my Dumbledore’s statement peculiar, and whether I need to explain it more fully.
Harry has not yet learned to step aside from hate, despite his fierce ability to love.
Comment from beta-reader (not intended as a correction):
Harry's ability to love is why he can feel such strong hatred. Don't you think?
I'm trying to puzzle this one out. Yes, I've said previously that I see love and hate as two sides of the same coin - but I was mainly thinking of obsessive love, needy love, love that can turn to hate when its needs aren't met. I had the impression that the love that can enable Harry to beat Dumbledore is of a higher quality, a love that reaches out in connection and is the antithesis of destruction. And in my experience that love cannot coexist with hate.
Perhaps I am wrong in my interpretation of Rowling's work: going back to the passage at the end of OotP, Harry throws off Voldemort when he thinks of seeing Sirius again and his 'heart filled with emotion'. The nature of that emotion is not specified, and arguably it could be a love born from need (of Sirius, of family). But Dumbledore says that Voldemort cannot reside in a body 'so full of the force he detests', and surely that force would not be so detestable if it could be twisted into hate.
Does learning to love selflessly lead to being able to hate more strongly? I can’t see it, myself. But I wonder if other readers might think my Dumbledore’s statement peculiar, and whether I need to explain it more fully.
