Seriously Sisyphean

hummingbrdheart:

Hermione isn’t a Ravenclaw, really, I don’t think. That this is a change from my firm stance throughout most of my time reading the books may not mean much to anyone else, but I guarantee you that if you had asked me-reading-for-the-first-time whether Hermione was a Gryffindor, I would have said no.

Here’s what the comment got me thinking about: the riddles to enter the Ravenclaw common room. They’re riddles, not logic puzzles. They’re not like Snape’s potion room, they’re more like…more like using the Mirror of Erised to get the Stone. Intuitive, logical in a more poetic sense. And maybe that’s what a Ravenclaw really is: not someone who is coolly logical all the time, but someone who can think in subtle ways, who can imagine and puzzle out answers that can’t be memorized or proved, but that are still true.

Think about Luna, the only Ravenclaw we really get to know. She’s anything but coolly logical — she’s strange and airy and brilliant and uses her own processes of learning to work through the world around her. What matters to her seems to be understanding, not exactly cleverness. She wants to understand, to comprehend, to know, to learn, not to memorize or “logic” out the answer. I mean, she can do that, but it’s not her passion.

And maybe that’s the difference: that Ravenclaws love and seek knowledge, not necessarily education, that they love truth not just facts. 

I’d never put too much thought into this, but it’s absolutely true. Bravo!