mahiwaga

I find it ironic when I think of who exactly got me to start reading the Harry Potter series in the first place. But that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

I am once again obsessed by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I keep ruminating about the relationship between Severus Snape and Lily Potter. It is also ironic that I didn’t see it coming. I’m so totally into the whole unrequited, tragic love thing, and I love characters who never get the girl, who never even had a chance, and who die hopeless and alone. I can’t believe that I had no clue whatsoever what exactly it was that bound Snape to keep Harry safe, and what made him so trustworthy to Dumbledore. You would’ve thought that I’d’ve been all over it.

It just dawned on me that the whole Severus & Lily subplot is so very Wuthering Heights. As Alyssa deconstructs it, Severus is Heathcliff and Lily is Catherine. The Brontë Blog has more literary analysis (and also compares Harry Potter himself to Jane Eyre.)

(As an excursus, my sister recently told me about a book that is a re-imagining of Jane Eyre, told from Bertha’s point-of-view. Bertha is recharacterized as a woman who comes from a non-Western culture, and what is described as madness in the original book is really just Bertha experiencing (1) a communication barrier and (2) culture shock. Or was my sister just describing The Wide Sargasso Sea?)

It makes me curious as to what was going through Snape’s mind the entire time. Did he think his life was pretty much over, and that to give his life in protection of Harry was, to paraphrase yet another tragic hero, Sydney Carton, a far, far better thing that he does, than he had ever done? Or was he in it for vengeance against the people who destroyed the one person whom he ever trusted, and whom once actually genuinely cared about him? I can only imagine the black hatred that he must have for Voldemort and the Death Eaters for killing Lily. And like Iñigo Montoya, perhaps he had never really thought of what life could be like once he had achieved his aim. (What’s even better is that he dies probably believing that he may have failed in his only remaining two reasons for living (1) to keep Harry safe and (2) to defeat Voldemort and the Death Eaters. For one thing, Snape died believing that Harry had to really die to be able to beat Voldemort, and in the final analysis, there was good chance that all of his and Dumbledore’s careful planning could end up going horribly wrong, with Voldemort winning after all.)

I really can’t wait until “The Deathly Hallows” hits the silver screen. If it’s done right (and, knowing Hollywood, that’s always a very big “if”), it should totally break my heart.

For some strange reason, I wake up at 1:45 a.m. My eyes are gooey and difficult to open because I fell asleep with my contacts in. I gaze outside my windowsill, and there’s the full moon gleaming down upon me, and I remember that today, there’s supposed to be a lunar eclipse.

So naturally the first place I go is to my computer, and I immediately Google “lunar eclipse” and find out it’s like starting in 10 minutes. Restless, and realizing that it would probably be futile to try and get back to sleep at this juncture, I head outside, intending only to get the box of bottled water I left in the trunk of my car, and maybe to get a glance at the beginning of the eclipse.

I walk past my cute neighbor’s window on my way to my car, and I see that she’s still awake watching TV, but I walk on by and tiptoe slowly down the stairs. Over the fence, there’s a couple already outside, waiting for the celestial event to commence.

I experiment idly with my camera which I knew would be incapable of capturing any sort of image from the sky. I finally figure out how to change the shutter speed on it, but this is of little consequence.

MSNBC, incidentally, popped up as the first news site on Google, with an article talking about the lunar eclipse. NASA has a detailed site that describes what to expect from the event. (As I type this, the moon is now leaving the Earth’s umbra.) I had read about the turquoise fringing caused by ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere scattering light onto the moon and was gratified to see them.

With lack of anything better to do, I hop in my car, hoping to find somewhere dark enough to get a better look at the sky.

The great thing about San Diego is that it doesn’t take very much to leave the city limits. In less than 20 minutes, I find myself on a rural highway heading to the sleepy little town of Jamul. I end up turning down some godforsaken side road, now facing the prominent San Miguel Mountain, where it is very dark indeed, but unfortunately, there aren’t any turnoffs. Eventually, I am faced with a sign reading “Pavement Ends.” But that’s never stopped me before, and sure enough, the asphalt turns into dirt. But as the road curves, I am greeted by the highbeams of an SUV. Damn. Law enforcement. (Sorry, it’s my reflex as a person of color.) Or maybe INS? However, I grow at ease as they don’t turn on any sirens and in fact turn off their lights entirely, which actually freaks me out more, and I’m wondering if they’re dealing drugs or trying to rid of some bodies. So I turn around.

I go back to the main road, but instead of heading home, I continue east on the way to Dulzura, but before I get there, I decide to head back west on Otay Lakes Rd. On my left (to the south) is bright light emanating from behind a mountain, and I’m wondering, is it dawn already? But then I remember that that’s where the state prison is, right before you get to the U.S.-Mexico border.

At this point, the moon looks like my dog had gotten a piece of it. It’s still too bright to really appreciate how red the shadowed part is (and it probably doesn’t help that I’m red-green color blind.) I start passing a few parked cars of people who are watching the eclipse. Despite the glaring lights of the state prison, it’s actually nice and dark enough to see quite a few stars, even. But unfortunately, they’ve taken up all the nice turnouts where I’d be willing to stop, and eventually I find myself unceremoniously dumped into the middle of that existential limbo known as suburbia. Defeated, I decide that it’s probably for the best that I head back home.