Magrat whirled away in the buffeting wind, clinging tightly to a broomstick which now, she feared, had about as much buoyancy as a bit of firewood. It certainly wasn’t capable of sustaining a full-grown woman against the beckoning fingers of gravity.
As she plunged down toward the forest roof in a long shallow dive she reflected that there was possibly something complimentary in the way Granny Weatherwax resolutely refused to consider other people’s problems. It implied that, in her considerable opinion, they were quite capable of sorting them out by themselves.
Sooner or later it’d get to you. Death was fascinated by humans, and study was never a one-way thing. A man might spend his life peering at the private life of elementary particles and then find he either knew who he was or where he was, but not both. Death had picked up…humanity. Not the real thing, but something that might pass for it until you examined it closely.
“The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stollen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.” —Equal Rites, Terry Pratchett.
One thing I love about Discworld books is that while there’s very few characters who are stupid and universally bad at everything. Sure, there’s loads of characters who are naive, or absentminded, or just good at/interested in one specific thing and not great at most other things, or who need a specific kind of environment to thrive and do poorly when they need to act outside of that environment. And all of those things can certainly be used for comedy. And some of the characters might not have found the thing/environment that works best for them. But still the thing is, that if you put them in the right environment, or the thing they are good at becomes relevant, they might do better than pretty much any other character.
And there’s just something that really feels good about that. Both in the sense that when I’m reading the books there’s a certain sense of respect and acknowledging the characters’ humanity, I guess, when the narrative treats them like that, when we get told or shown that hey this character actually knows a lot about x, they only seem stupid and clueless because they’re just entirely a fish out of water in the circumstances that they exist in in this story. And there’s also some comfort in that thought to me personally, that maybe I feel like a clumsy fool 99% of the time simply because I’m in the wrong situation or haven’t found the thing I’m good at yet.
And even further, sometimes the characters themselves have consciously put themselves into those situations and might even be excited to be in them, despite it being painfully clear that they are Not Good At It. And sometimes they figure out how to do it right and make it their thing, and learn to apply that enthusiasm in The Thing in a better way and become good at it. And other times they come to realize that they’ve been forcing themselves into a mould they do not fit in because of pressure from other people or general social expectations, or they’ve been chasing a goal they thought they wanted for whatever reason but turns out they don’t actually want it. And then they find out what’s the actual environment they fit in or thing they want to do and start doing that instead.
And idk where I was going with this but. I just love that the books do that.
THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING. HAVE A GHERKIN.
I’m always struck by the amount of small gifts Terry Pratchett left us. My whole adult life, I’ve been stumbling across little tidbits of knowledge, references or jokes or even just words, that he inserted into a novel in passing and that I get to feel like I’ve rediscovered like some kind of cultural archeologist. He was so interested in absolutely everything that there’s no telling where I’ll find what I’ve started calling a reverse reference in my head - to me, it’s the real world that’s making a callout to the one in his head. While I love getting the jokes in a Pratchett novel, there’s just something so joyful about the double discovery of a cool new fact and the thought that Terry Pratchett thought it was cool too.
Damn! Damn! Damn! Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.
I do have worlds enough and time to spare an hour to find a rhyme to take a week to pen an article a day to find a rhyme for ‘particle.’ In many worlds my time is free to spend ten minutes over tea And steal the time from some far moon so words can take all afternoon, Away beyond the speed of light I’ll write a novel in one night. Aeons beckon, if I want ‘em… …but I can’t have ‘em, ‘cos of Quantum.
