Galileo once wrote in a letter that the eighteen years he spent teaching in Padua were the happiest of his life. His classes were always packed, and because Galileo was so short, his students even built him a two-meter platform.
Counting the year Harry Potter left school and hid in the wilderness to evade the Death Eaters, Severus had taught at Hogwarts for sixteen years.
In his own words, that time had been like hell. He was always making trouble for himself. The little Trolls did not want to do their homework, yet he insisted on assigning them numerous difficult essays. Every time he saw those perfunctory papers, he got furious. What he was doing was simply wasting both his own time and life, and everyone else's.
His life was exhausting, and everyone else found him exhausting too. You only got one life, so why not take it easy? Look, she had just accomplished a miracle. The old bat who always tinkered with potions and Dark magic in the dungeons had actually come out to bask in the sun.
Though he was pale as a vampire, he was still human. Sunlight could not kill vampires, but it could make them very, very tired. The symptoms resembled a severe cold: not dead, yet not truly alive. The problem was, they could not recover from it the way one recovered from a cold. That was what made it so utterly exhausting.
By the time Galileo left the University of Padua, he was already famous, yet his life was not as pleasant as it had been when he was a poor teacher.
Especially during the three years he was imprisoned in Rome. Though he lived in the luxurious Villa Medici and could overlook the whole of Rome, it absolutely did not feel the