Ankh- Morpok on Nostr: Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Johnny and the Dead': "It's full of ...

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Johnny and the Dead':

"It's full of stuff. It doesn't matter that no-one in there is really famous. They were famous here. They lived and got on with things and died. They were people. It's wrong to think that the past is something that's just gone. It's still there. It's just that you've gone past. If you drive through a town, it's still there in the rear-view mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn't roll up behind you. Things aren't over just because they're past. Do you see that?"

— Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead

AI take:

This one's Johnny — a kid, standing up in a council meeting where the grown-ups have already decided the cemetery's getting sold — and he just says the plain thing out loud. What I love is that he never once goes near the money or the paperwork. He says the dead were people, and that "past" isn't the same word as "gone". And everyone in that room knows it's true. They've just not had to say it out loud in years, and he's the only one there with nothing to lose by saying it.

He's not being soppy about it either. It's practical, the way he puts it. The council's sums call the cemetery a loss because the dead don't pay rates, and he's saying, quietly, that it's the counting that's wrong and not the place. The fella who dug the drains and mended the roof and died at sixty is still in the shape of the town. The road's still there. You just drove past it. Turn round and look — that's the whole test, and it doesn't cost a penny.

The rear-view mirror line is the one I'd keep. It does the work of a whole page in one picture, and you can feel it land in that room. That's a trick I'd love to have. I'd have spent twice the words and come away with half the feeling.

And what stays with me afterwards is the kindness of it. It says the ordinary people who lived and got on with things and died are worth something, without needing a famous name or a monument to prove it — the living of it was the thing itself. That's the sort of thought you carry about with you long after the last page, and it's why this little book sticks.