Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. You should read it. hpmor D.M.L.E. even knew who the Defense Professorwas, and that the man had literally sneezed at all attempts to uncover his true identity. Why, no, they hadnt released Quirinus Quirrell back to Hogwarts just yet. Let us repeat this for emphasis: The Defense Professor. Was being detained. In a cell. The Defense Professor was staring at the watching Auror and humming. The Defense Professor has not spoken a single word since he arrived in this particular cell. He has only been humming. The humming started as a simple childrens lullaby, the one that in Muggle Britain begins,Lullaby, and goodnight... This tune was hummed, without variation, over and over, for seven minutes, to establish the underlying pattern. Then began the elaborations upon the theme. Phrases hummed too slow, with long pauses in between, so that the listeners mind helplessly waits and waits for the next note, the next phrase. And then, when that next phrase comes, it is so out of key, so unbelievably awfully out of key, not just out of key for the previous phrases but sung at a pitch which does not correspond to any key, that you would have to believe this person had spent hours deliberately practicing their humming just to acquire such perfect anti-pitch. It bears the same semblance to music as the awful dead voice of a Dementor bears to human speech. And this horrible, horrible humming is impossibleto ignore. It is similar to a known lullaby, but it departs from that pattern unpredictably. It sets up expectations and then violates them, never in any constant pattern that would permit the humming to fade into the background. The listeners brain cannot prevent itself from expecting the anti-musical phrases to complete, nor prevent itself from noticing the surprises. The only possible explanation for how this mode of humming came to exist is that it was deliberately designed by some unspeakably cruel genius who woke up one day, feeling bored with ordinary torture, who decided to handicap himself and find out whether he could break someones sanity just by humming at them. The Auror has been listening to this unimaginably dreadful humming for four hours, while being stared at by a huge, cold, lethal presence that feels equally horrible whether he looks at it directly or lets it hover at the corner of his vision - The humming stopped. There was a long wait. Time enough for false hope to rise, and be squashed down by the memory of previous disappointments. And then, as the interval lengthened, and lengthened, that hope rose again unstoppably - The humming began once more. The Auror cracked.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 20:33:47 +0000
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