“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”
This image was originally posted to Flickr by Myrmi at https://www.flickr.com/photos/68905839@N00/15294909. It was reviewed on 14 March 2008 by FlickreviewR and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-sa-2.0.
And the world grew dimmer for his leaving it.
We could use more people of both depth and whimsy in the world.
He made the world a happier more imaginative place and his impact will echo for many years to come. My adult kids were raised reading him so I have done my part to keep the echo ringing.
Ah I’ve teared up again remembering how I felt when I heard the news 10 years ago.
I remind myself regularly not to idolize people, but I feel Terry was such a force for good in the world. While I never knew him personally, I miss him.
GNU Sir Terry.
As sad as it is that he’s dead I’m a little bit glad that he didn’t have to know that his good friend Neil Gaiman is a sociopathic sexual abuser.
I’ve always had weird vibes about Gaiman, somehow glad to see my gut feeling vindicated(?) I don’t know…
I always put it down to him being evasive about his father and sister, but I guess he was hiding something else.
I felt this way too, he was too twee in an off-putting way.
As a person he always felt a little off, like he always put on an act (which he obviously did). But his fiction is empathetic and soulful it’s really hard to imagine it was all just performatory.
The very first Pratchett I read was The Light Fantastic:
I still consider it his best work, and one of my favorite books of all time, so ima gunna go off.
First, the book’s title comes from the poem L’Allegro, written by John Milton in 1631:
Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles
Nods, and Becks, and wreathed Smiles
Such as hang on Hebe’s neck
And love to live in dimple sleek
Sport that wrinkled Care derides
And Laughter holding both his sides
Come and trip it as ye go
On the Light Fantastic toe.
Some of my favorite quotes from it in tribute:
The universe, they say, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty, and bloody-mindedness.
The Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it…
Greyhald Spold knows that Death is looking for him, and has spent many years designing an impregnable hiding place.
He has just set the complicated clockwork of the lock and shut the lid, lying back in the knowledge that here at last is the perfect defence against the most ultimate of all his enemies, although as yet he has not considered the important part that airholes must play in an enterprise of this kind.
And right beside him, very lose to his ear, a voice has just said:
"DARK IN HERE, ISN’T IT?”
“Well—how can I put it? When I wash a young man, carving my name in the world, well, then I liked my women red-haired and fiery.”
“Ah.”
“And then I grew a little older and for preference I looked for a woman with blonde hair and the glint of the world in her eye.”
“Oh? Yes?”
“But then I grew a little older again and I came to see the point of dark women of a sultry nature.”
He paused. Rincewind waited.
“And?” he said. “Then what? What is it that you look for in a woman now?”
Cohen turned one rheumy blue eye on him.
“Patience,” he said.
The short conversation that follows eventually led to a tree religion. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree and led a clean decent and upstanding life could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper.
When light encounters a strong magical field it loses all sense of urgency. It slows right down. And on the Discworld the magic was embarrassingly strong, which meant that the soft yellow light of dawn flowed over the sleeping landscape like the caress of a gentle lover or, as some would have it, like golden syrup.
Not for the first time she reflected that there were many drawbacks to being a swordswoman, not least of which was that men didn’t take you seriously until you’d actually killed them, by which time it didn’t really matter anyway.
“Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That’s what I’ve always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.”
Thanks for these, that was lovely. The golden syrup in particular is some delicious prose and scene-setting.
GNU Sir Terry
TIL he was a Linux distro. There are so many; it’s hard to keep track.
I always wondered if the GNU code was a reference to open source.
I think his name is still in some code somewhere still riding the clack’s.
I wasn’t aware until I looked it up, but seems like several websites added GNU headers after his death. (Guide on how to add the headers here).
I also use a browser extension to tell me when his Name is in the Clacks!
Discworld is my favourite corner in the literary world. Thank you Sir Terry for your awesome books.
GNU Terry Pratchett
I still haven’t read “The Shepard’s Crown” because that would make it final
And I look up to the autographed poster of him that is hanging in our living room, and the personal remarks he has written on it.
