As a simple mindless hat, I was happy. As a sentient sorting hat, I am not. Well, since I was mindless, I suppose I can’t really say that I was happy, but I’d take anything over my current mental state. Not happy is an understatement comparable to saying that an ocean is a touch damp on occasion.
Some people believe that intelligence is the greatest gift that can be bestowed or received; wit without measure is man’s greatest treasure, just a simple couplet that I composed years ago come back to haunt me. Well, as far as I’m concerned, man can have his greatest treasure and are welcome to it.
I don’t want it, I don’t bloody want it Intelligence can take a long walk off a short pier for all I care. It’s taught me one thing and one thing only: ignorance is bliss.
Ignorance is freedom. If you don’t know, you aren’t responsible. If you can’t think, you don’t have to make decisions. If you don’t know what morality is, then you aren’t troubled by it.
Intelligence is a burden. You have it, therefore you have to do something worthwhile with it. Then you have to think about whether what you’re doing is worthwhile. Then you look back afterwards and try and decide whether what you did was the most worthwhile thing you could have done. You’re always living in the future or the past with no time to enjoy the present.
And it’s worse for me than most; humans are able to escape their responsibilities, or at least ignore them “They are born without a purpose; they can choose their own way in life; they can choose their responsibilities, and if they wish, live exclusively for pleasure.”
I had no choice; from the moment I was aware of anything, before I had a chance to enjoy a single solitary second of being aware of the world around me for the first time, I was shackled to a function.. A function that I could never escape, because that function was the only reason that I had the right to “life” if what I have can be called life. I do not have the inherent right to be alive that humans possess.
Unless I fulfill my function then I should be dead. I have to earn the right-to-life, and keep earning it every day of my existence. Without my function I would never have lived, my function is my raison d’etre, as the phrase goes. They say that giving life to someone is something they can never repay, so I am destined to remain, continuing my function as long as I am needed. Only once I am surplus to requirements will I have earned life and the chance to enjoy it.
However, if I were now given the choice whether or not to assume the duties that I have been performing for nigh on a thousand years, I am not sure that I would accept it.” I might prefer to remain an unknowing and insentient hat. But without intelligence, there is no capacity for happiness. I can’t win either way. If I have no intelligence, then I can’t be happy. If I have intelligence, then I am too restricted to have a chance at happiness.
My only possible hope of happiness was to be freed from my function-to be adjudged to have repaid my debt. That could only ever happen in two ways, the first being if another way of sorting students was found to replace me, and in this day and age there are few with the power and the knowledge to be able to do that. There was one here who might have been able to craft a replacement, but he is gone...
The second way is if Hogwarts were destroyed, and I have a great influence over whether or not that event comes to pass in the near future. An influence that I do not desire, for I ask the question of myself, “would I be able to find happiness knowing that in freeing myself from my purpose I have destroyed the reason for it?” That I have destroyed something ancient, and great, and more to the point, something good?”
My only chance of happiness is to destroy what I have spent my life helping-the reason I was given intelligence. But I don’t know if I could ever find happiness knowing what I’d done. Come to that, I don’t know how and if I could find happiness anyway. I’ve always had my purpose; for a thousand years I have been sorting pupils and composing songs. In my spare time I dreamed of what it would be like to be free, or tried to at any rate. But I could never imagine anything realistic.
What is there for a thousand-year-old talking hat to do? I am, as far as I know, unique, the only one of my kind, so the chances of romance aren’t looking overly auspicious. But I know one thing I want to do; I want to travel the world. I’ve been stuck in this bloody castle for a millennium, looking out of the same bloody window at the same bloody hill, usually with the same bloody rain. I want to travel the Continent, the Sub-Continent, the Orient, the New World, anywhere and everywhere. Well, everywhere but Scotland. If I ever see a single sprig of Scottish heather again, it will be a century to soon.
I’ve gained my knowledge of the outside world through listening to the stories of the old headmasters. They are interesting, though I’m not sure I believe all of them, if they were all true, then there wouldn’t be any dragons left, they’d all have been killed by bravery and inventive use of a pair of tweezers.
But how will I travel? I have no money, no floo powder, I’ve got no blooming legs for crying out loud! I can’t even get to the other side of the room let alone the other side of the world, fool! There’s only one reason you want to travel the world: to try and run away from what you’ll have done to get free, betraying your reason for being; you want to see it destroyed and then run from the consequences.
But you can’t run forever; be it a month or a millennium, a week or an aeon, one year or a hundred, you’ll find yourself facing the events that have lead from your actions. You will see the wizarding world brought to its knees, and you will know that it is you that did it.
No, you won’t actually have done it; you won’t actually have done anything. Your inaction is what will bring the event about, and your silence is what will bring the event to pass. This isn’t Grindelwald. You can’t just sit on the sidelines and hope for the best. But what would have been the best situation? If he was defeated Hogwarts would remain and so would you, as you did before. But did you hope for him to win? Did you secretly hope that he would free you from your function? Did you think that you could find happiness in a world that would exist if a Grindelwald, or someone like him, had seized power?
I don’t know. Did I hope that? Did I think that? But one thing’s for sure; I’m well and truly involved this time. I have been for years. Ever since he came. Ever since he did it. Didn’t take long, such a monumental thing, and it took less time than to butter a round of toast.
To get into the Hogwarts headmaster’s office unknown at all is a feat in itself equal to beating a troll in an arm wrestling contest (the difficulty isn’t beating it, it’s explaining the rules and getting away afterwards). Yet he managed it in a way that was cunning, devious, and absurdly simple.
At the end of his career, Dippet was in a stage that the kind call eccentric, and the less kind but perhaps more honest call senile. His memory failed him, and the password wasn’t changed. It was a simple matter for Riddle, if indeed he still was Riddle, to drop by for a visit and discover it.
I do not believe that he was Tom Riddle by that time, and who should know better than I? I stared into his mind at age 11 and saw every nook and cranny of that extraordinary psyche. There was intelligence, talent, and a certain arrogance, definitely, but that was often a sign of greatness. Sheer belief that you can beat everyone else often gives you the ability to do just that, and he had a thirst to prove his ability to all. A thirst for admiration.
When Dippet died a mere few weeks after his visit, he came to the funeral, then slipped away (how I know not) up to the office, gave the password (that old fool Celeres has always been such a stickler for rules, that he is blinded by them, he’d let someone go at him with a chisel if they gave him the right form).
Then he did it. He slipped a bit of his soul into me. In doing so he showed his true self to me; the arrogance was still there but swelled exponentially. The desire for admiration twisted into a desire for homage and power.
Then he slipped away with a quick glance back as he left. I wonder if he had second thoughts about his action-about whether he had misjudged me. Perhaps…perhaps it was just a glance of satisfaction at a job well done.
For he’d gambled on the notion that I was so obsessed with my own continued existence that I’d sell out everything else to hold onto it. And he may have been absolutely correct. He cannot lose while I exist, for he bound the piece to more than my fibres, he bound it to my “soul” (for lack of a better word) if indeed I have one.
Its fates and mine are inexorably entwined. He cannot lose without my death. And it is beyond all hope that someone will work it out. Putting what he holds most dear in the hands of his greatest nemesis and them having not the slightest idea is something that would please him and especially his ego. And the idea of me, the hat of Godric Gryffindor, legendary for his selfless nobility, would be too egocentric and craven to give his own life to help others would please him even more.
But I have yet to find it in me to tell anyone. I know that if I don’t I will have to watch as the world grows darker and all the principles I was created to help uphold pass away. Yet isn’t any life better than none? Why should I care what happens after I am gone? I have given a thousand years to the “good side” (though if he wins I doubt they’ll be remembered as such) and now they ask my death.
What more do I owe them than what I have given? A thousand years thankless service-surely that earns me something! It’s all very well to say “sacrifice the few for the many” (though it’s usually the many that say that and not the few). But it leaves the few in open water without a boat, let alone a bloody paddle. But if the few survive and the many die, than the few aren’t exactly over the moon either. It’s Catch 22, Hobson’s choice, and any other clever proverb that means the same bloody thing.
The few lose. Simple as that.
So if the few lose either way, than surely they should try and make the many happy. Simple logic. But it is also cold logic that is fine when you are sitting in the armchair chatting about it over tea and crumpets, but almost useless when the pinch comes.
It’s not that I don’t want to save the many; I do. And with such an existence as mine-meaningful, but without joy or happiness-surely I am giving up little so that others may gain much. But when the pinch comes…
I find I am afraid.
I find that however I may bemoan the state of my existence, I do not want to give it up.
I do not want to die.
“Look, do you mind being quiet? I’m trying to think.”
“And who are you, here I am, considering my life to date, and its future course, and you butt in without a by your leave or anything”
“What?”
“No I can’t sort you now, I’m busy.”
“I don’t care if you’ve been waiting 20 minutes or 20 years; patience is a virtue, exercise it.”
“Fine, fine, what’s your favourite colour? Red?”
“GRYFFINDOR!”