Young Slytherin

[resonant]

I was fed up with books, which I still continued to gulp down with indiscriminate voracity, and searched for another key to the highest truths: there must be a key, and I was certain that, owing to some monstrous conspiracy to my detriment and the world's, I would not get it in school. In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors."

Ambitious; intelligent but not quite scholarly; arrogant ... Marauder-era Snape?

(The quote is from "Hydrogen," a chapter of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, which is a perfectly astonishing book.)

Comments

[domesticgoddess.livejournal.com]

:Nods:: Oh yes. Definitely. BTW I blame you fully for my newish fascination for Snape. Well you and Alan Rickman!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Hooray! Always happy to be partly responsible for another obsession.

And of course always happy to team up with Alan Rickman to do anything whatsoever ...

[domesticgoddess.livejournal.com]

LOL! I'll bet.

[strawberrythief.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed.

*twitches* Now I want to write fic. Oh, no, wait... now I want you to write fic. :)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

*twitches* Now I want to write fic. Oh, no, wait... now I want you to write fic. :)

No, but see, the whole point of putting this up in my LJ was to have the pleasure of reading Young Snape without actually having to write Young Snape.

Primo Levi had a much more friendly and engaging personality than Snape (at least in his writings*), but it seems plausible to me that Snape's attitude toward potions would be similar to Levi's attitude toward chemistry. In a later essay, Levi refers to the work of a practical chemist as "fornicating with matter in order to support myself."

Here's how he personifies Matter:

on the other side, responding with enigmas, stood Matter, with her sly passivity, ancient as the All and portentiously rich in deceptions, as solemn and subtle as the Sphinx.

And he points out (in an essay about identifying sugar that has been laced with arsenic) that "a chemist without a [good] nose is in for trouble."

* Of course, for all we know, Snape might also have a friendly and engaging writing voice. He could be the beloved author of warm, amusing essays on the life of a potions master, the Primo Levi of the wizard world -- or the James Herriott, for that matter. He could spend his evenings answering fan mail with grace and charm while trembling students spend their detentions cleaning cauldrons in the next room ...