Sir Terry Pratchett died recently, at home and at peace with his family and cat.
It’s difficult to overstate the impact his writing had on me. I still have the very first book of his I read – Mort – that I took out time after time from the high school library until eventually it came home with me after graduation. Wry, wise and totally without pretention, Discworld books filled the tiny bookshelf over my bed in my freshman dorm room, then came with me in the following years when I wore out the binding of Thief of Time and gladly lost a half-dozen others on “indefinite loan” to new fans.
It’s not just that Sir Terry wrote books that were brilliantly fun, satirical – though never mean – and lighthearted (though they are) or that the use of clever footnotes is something I’ve always loved, or that he became a powerful speaker for Alzheimer’s awareness in his last years while continuing to turn out fantastically clever novels. I’d read them again for that alone, but it’s the deep, immense love of Humanity the Storyteller shining through each page that has stuck with me.
His books didn’t idealize people – they frequently mocked jingoism, closed-mindedness and more – but they recognized that, with all our faults and differences, we share a common nature. In Carpe Jugulum, the witch Granny Weatherwax sits with the conflicted young priest Father Oats, and says:
“…And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that . . .”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes . . .”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things . . . ”
Oats says “It’s a lot more complicated than that” – but the truth is that seeing people as people is perhaps the most complicated and most difficult duty of all. It doesn’t mean having to like everyone, or that everyone is moral – just that each person is a real, complex being full of hopes and dreams and fears.
And in all his stories, Sir Terry believed in finding that complexity and in demonstrating the power of stories to define us and empower us to define our world. We’re pattern-finding, storytelling beings who tell each other who we were, who we are and who we want to be through sharing stories, and more than that, by living them and believing in them.
After death on Discworld, people went to dozens of fates, but all of those fates were driven by the essential principle that what you believe happens, happens – the story you expect to be a part of, you are. And he argued that that metaphysical principle applied to the living as well. In Hogfather, Death talks to his daughter:
“HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.”
We live in a great world of stories – some that we lead, some that we’ve joined, and some that are being told without and around us. We’re all the centers of our own stories, and we have the power to define what other stories we want to be a part of – in a tapestry of a world that can be far more complex and more magnificent than even the immense breadth of Discworld, carried on the backs of four elephants and one giant space-going turtle.
Go in joy, Sir Terry, knowing the delight you have left behind you. Your words have sunk deep into the hearts of your readers, and no matter what, in the words of the golem Dorfl in Feet of Clay:
“WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN.”
Image from the author’s personal collection