The Rationale of Condemning a Soul
Disclaimer: Severus Snape is a masterpiece created by that surpreme artist J. K. Rowling. This is just one of many possible interpretations of that masterpiece.
Human thought is dialectic. We understand the world by a method of comparison: what a thing is not identifies what it is. Muggle philosophers have known this for centuries. Snape understands it because he has been a teacher for the last 16 years. As he is forced to spend the majority of each day supervising repetitive, banal lessons his mind has ample time to wander, to calculate, define, articulate and expand each concept that occurs to him.
So he also knows what this particular deduction means in practice: What is not good, must be bad; what is not attractive must be unattractive; what is not liked must be disliked. Snape is an embodiment of all that is opposite of comforting and 'normal'. He is no longer young, so he must be old. His students see this. They are young, they are right and they are beautiful, so he is not.
His colleagues, what do they see? A man not young, not yet old. A creature not of light and yet not wholly of the dark. A person of passion for art, yet lacking the warmth of human generosity- love. Even those who are more insightful see only an unnatural thing, a being of no definition…lacking in substance perhaps. A phantasm of uncertain loyalty and purpose.
To escape the path his thoughts have taken, Snape contemplates how one would define each student in front of him: Not experienced, not open, not understanding or considering, not choosing a path, but letting it be chosen for them. They are uniformly stereotypical and he wonders if the students of his day were so tediously predictable. Perhaps. He is an unusual man and his peers are all unique in their own right. Are there individual shapes his students will attain as time erodes their varnish to reveal the grain beneath, or is it already visible to those less critical, more open to the perception of it?
What a thing is not…
No-one ever proved that people saw the 'truth'. This dialectic process of ours allows for easy categorizing but camouflages the complex layers of the world: Night is not day, but neither are dusk and dawn.
Dusk. He is moving into the dark. Hogwarts might stand pitiless in its implacable, static state, but he is forced ever closer to that waiting, enveloping night.
Enough. All things have their contrast. If he is dusk then what is dawn? His opposite, his equivalent. A thing forever untouchable but irrevocably linked. A person new birthed into the day, but with a history reaching back into the darkness. His opposite: Darkness to light. Light to darkness.
He knows its name. Not quite his opposite after all: A boy with hair the colour of his own. Snape judged him as one of the stereotypical masses. Wrong then. It is only a faulty dialectic. But we all use it. So to them (him) the definition stands: Evil, unattractive, hated.
Very well. Another thing Snape has learned: To appreciate light one must have experienced the dark. Our appreciation of any state is found only by our knowledge of its contrast. And so in the end all things have their purpose: The cruel, ugly things exist to give context to words like "good" and "beautiful". They are the impetus that forces us to our finest moments of humanity.
For him, somehow, the equation has been twisted so that he must move from purity toward corruption and back, over and over. But beyond his own tangled thread, he can see the grand design. And this in the end is what does define him: he does not view life as these children do, as most people do- as a thing of personal strife and achievement. Snape understands with the same impersonal vision as his mentor that his job is simply to move from day into night so that the dawn may follow.
He just hopes that one day those in the sunshine understand how the dialectic works:
What a thing is not…