Why the Sun Did Not Rise Today

This was going to be an audiovisual post, but sometimes there's an event about which I simply must write. Yesterday was such an event in the world of literature.

I'll start by saying that the death of a celebrity is not something which usually affects me on a personal level; I was sad, but didn't cry over Robin Williams. Same for Leonard Nimoy. I don't feel close enough to them for it to have a visceral impact. That said, I cried when I saw this on Twitter:

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

The End.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

For those who've not read Terry Pratchett (and if you've not you should have), Death is a recurring character in his Discworld series of fantasy books. His dialog is always in all capitals, so this final series of tweets on the occasion of Sir Terry's passing reads as a meeting between the author and his creation as the Reaper takes  his hand and leads him to whatever lies beyond. Yes, I cried over it.

I felt that we already mourned him once when he learned he had a rare form of early-onset alzheimers, but with the books continuing to appear it seemed that he'd be with us always, and cheat death. We know that that isn't the case for anyone. We can, of course, take comfort in the work he left behind. In one sense he'll never truly have left us as long as his work is still to be read. What did we lose - especially those of us who would never meet Sir Terry? I'm reminded of a scene from Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels. The personification of dreams (known as Dream) had just died. Cain and Abel (from the Bible. It's THAT kind of book. Also highly, highly recommended) were discussing the funeral with another character:

“Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?""Then what died? who are you mourning?""A point of view."

Isn't that all that ever dies? Someone's unique way of seeing the world? We still have the legacy of Sir Terry's words and ideas. What we don't have is anyone who sees the world exactly as he did.

Who Was Sir Terry?

Pratchett at a convention. You have to love his
self-deprecating sense of humor

He's best known as a humorous fantasy writer, his best known work by far being the Discworld series. I discussed the series overall in my review of what was, tragically, the very last volume in a post here. How sad it makes me feel to have given so poor a review to a master's very final work! The first time I read one of his books was over twenty years ago now, making his a presence through half of my life to date. He was extremely prolific and extremely engaging.

The primary tribute I've seen online has been to share favorite quotes. I'll do the same herein, starting with a bit on economic justice. Neil Gaiman, another terrific British writer, described his friend Pratchett as a very angry man, whose anger fueled a decades-long writing career. Here;s his character, police chief Sam Vimes, on income inequality

"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. 
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feed dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and still have wet feet. 
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness. "But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feed dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness. "

He was also a writer who is very easy to dismiss, as he primarily wrote not just fantasy but comic fantasy. In my eyes, fantasy is important in that it gives us another language to tell truths too big for literal language. In closing, I'll share the quote the activist and writer Steampunk Emma Goldman shared. The scene here is a scrap of dialog between the aforementioned Death and his daughter Susan. They've just saved The Hogfather (a sort of Santa-Claus analog in the Discworld universe) from assassination. Susan had been told that, had the Hogfather died, the sun would not rise the next day.

"Now...tell me..."
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?
"Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"
NO."Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.She turned on him."It's been a long night, Grandfather! I'm tired and I need a bath! I don't need silliness!"THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN."Really? Then what would have happened, pray?A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.They walked in silence for a moment."Ah," said Susan dully. "Trickery with words. I would have thought you'd have been more literal-minded than that."I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED. TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE."All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need...fantasies to make life bearable."REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. 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...YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?"

Today many of us feel that the Hogfather has died and that, in place of a glorious sunrise, the clockwork of the world turned in such a way that we'd face a large, burning ball of gas.