As virtuous men pass mildly away · 7:51pm Mar 14th, 2015
"Master, have you ever been in love?"
"Oh yes, many times...Plato...Aristotle..."
Umberto Ecco, The Name of the Rose
To love even a living author through their works is to be something of a Dante to their Beatrice: you will treasure their every word, think about them constantly, praise them to whoever will listen--and they will never know who you are.
Loving so one-sidedly is something most people only do when they're young. So I was a little too old, when Terry Pratchett came along, to fall in love with him the way many people who are younger than me have.
And that is as well because falling in love with any artist, in any way, is a risky proposition: the best ones are usually the worst people. Pratchett was unusual in that he wasn't. He was safe--yet how could we have known it at the time?
Anyway I'd already developed my immunity. Because of that, I'm spared the grief my juniors now feel. That must be accounted a blessing.
So why do I look so wistfully on their mourning?
Because not all tears are evil.
:')
I was shaped by Sir Pterry's words, and shaped in such a way that can never be repeated, no matter what I read. I'll change, yes, but... well. It's, like many things in life, best explained through monophyletic cladistics. I'll change, but I'll always be me, changing. I can never grow out of what I once was, merely add onto it and move on[1]. That initial shaping will be with me, always.
And, so, I guess, you had to come across those books at a certain age to mourn as much. Perhaps.
[1] Just like we can't help but be opisthokonts, for all our later evolution through metazoa and so on, right down to the 'Wise Wise Human' as it pleases us to call ourselves.
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Oh it's a long way from Amphioxus
It's a long way to us,
Oh it's a long way from Amphioxus
To the meanest human cuss:
Oh it's goodbye to fins and gill-slits
Hello teeth and hair,
Oh it's a long, long way from Amphioxus
But we all came from there!
I've spent so much time stepping on my temper and wrestling myself onto an even keel that I no longer find myself able to deliberately give in to passion, good or bad. I can sit there and want to, but I'll still be wound up tight, reflexively stepping on every flare of feeling and thereby keeping myself separate from the world.
The mourning cast the control down, for a little while, and put me in common, shared emotional cause with an immense group. It's the kind of vulnerable group belonging that many people go to sporting events to capture. The wistfulness is natural--you got left out of an important moment of group emotional bonding. It's OK, Ed--you can still hang out with us kids.
This is why I write drunk, by the by. I can't make myself honest when I'm sober. I've been trying to work on that, a little bit at a time, with too-honest comments like this.
Terry Pratchett is more or less to blame for everything I've ever written. He looked at a crazy world (round, flat, on the backs of elephants, swimming through space on a turtle) and did his best to make sense of it. And that's what I've tried to do, take Equestria on its own terms and find some sense in it. And, when I'm at my best, I feel Terry's hand on my shoulder. (THAT'S NOT TERRY. THAT'S ME, smiled Death. Death always smiles.)