Fearful Symmetry

Dumbledore: "After all this time Severus?"

Snape: "Always."

Ever have one of those weeks?

Now I know that David Bowie and Alan Rickman are not exactly the most universally liked sorts of guys.  Some of you may even be wondering why I'm getting so worked up about this, but this is what happens when you let art touch your life.  Rickman passed away today, at age 69, after a battle with cancer.  The announcement reads almost exactly the same for David Bowie earlier this week.

Karl Jung sometimes toyed around with a thing he called synchronicity, which is when seemingly unrelated things are somehow meaningful.  It's not a particularly scientifically verifiable phenomenon and it is deeply rooted in the ability of the human psyche to make connections.  It's also an amazing album by the Police and if Sting drops dead next week, I'm going to freak out. (Sting is only 64 and not battling cancer that I know of, but sometimes rules get broken).

Alan Rickman has been famous for playing bad guys.  He was Hans Gruber in Die Hard, and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and of course Severus Snape, in all of the Harry Potter movies.  Snape was apparently the role he was absolutely born to play, a dark and brooding character who plays the heel for most of the series, but is secretly motivated by an aching love that essentially transforms every thing about him from darkness into light.  If watching the scene above doesn't bring tears, you probably need to check for your soul, because I think you lost it somewhere.

Rickman has been, pretty much since Robin Hood, one of the actors I would look for in movie cast lists to decide if I wanted to see the movie. According to IMDB he was credited in 44 movies and 19 TV shows, and some of them you may not have ever seen, but he had a prolific career for someone who didn't start acting until he was 42.  He did characters, especially bad guys, so well he was a danger of stealing the show.  He certainly would have in Robin Hood, if it wasn't for the fact that most people just remember Kevin Costner's behind and a Bryan Adams song from that movie.  He has been the voice of God (the Metatron) in Dogma, he has been the clinically depressed robot, Marvin, in A Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, he has even been Ronald Reagan in The Butler. Let's just say Alan had some range.

But actors and artists pass away every day, death happens.  I guess I'm just eulogizing here because this guy was special to me. Even his voice in a movie was like hearing from an old friend. He was just so good at being bad, that you kind of knew he had to be a really nice person in the real world (he was by most accounts including Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) who basically spent his childhood working with Rickman).

He taught us all, (I guess Rowling gets some credit too) about the redemptive power of love, and the world certainly needs more of that.

The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature