The Wisdom of Terry Pratchett (Part IV)

I wonder if anyone is gathering wisdom from these entries, perhaps making their lives better. I hope not. That would mean I was letting Mr. Pratchett down. But, if you’ve been laughing and forgetting about doing important things thus causing a cosmic tailspin to occur in your or other’s lives, feel free to leave a note of encouragement. My goal: 50 lives disturbed!

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From “Pyramids”

Djelibeybi really was a small, self-centered kingdom. Even its plagues were half-hearted. All self-respecting river kingdoms have vast supernatural plagues, but the best the Old Kingdom had been able to achieve in the last hundred years was the Plague of the Frog. It was quite a big frog, however, and got into the air ducts and kept everyone awake for weeks.

Djelibeybi : child of the djel.

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive, you could get death for free.

The gates of the Assassins’ Guild were never shut. This was said to be because Death was open for business all the time, but it was really because the hinges had rusted centuries before and no one had got around to doing anything about it.

Counterwise wine is made from grapes belonging to that class of flora — reannuals — that grow only in excessively high magic fields. Normal plants grow after the seeds have been planted — with reannuals it’s the other way round. Although reannual wine causes inebriation in the normal way, the action of the digestive system on its molecules causes an unusual reaction whose net effect is to thrust the ensuing hangover backward in time, to a point some hours before the wine is drunk. Hence the saying: have a hair of the dog that’s going to bite you.

When the Thieves’ Guild declared a General Strike in the Year of the Engaging Sloth, the actual level of crime doubled.

One of the two legends about the founding of Ankh-Morpork relates that the two orphaned brothers who built the city were in fact found and suckled by a hippopotamus (lit. orijeple, although some historians hold that this is a mistranslation of orejaple, a type of glass-fronted drinks cabinet). Eight heraldic hippos line the bridge, facing out to sea. It is said that if danger ever threatens the city, they will run away.

The other legend, not normally recounted by citizens, is that at an even earlier time a group of wise men survived a flood sent by the gods by building a huge boat, and on this boat they took two of every type of animal then existing on the Disc. After some weeks the combined manure was beginning to weigh the boat low in the water so — the story runs — they tipped it over the side, and called it Ankh-Morpork.

Like many river valley cultures the Kingdom has no truck with such trivia as summer, springtime and winter, and bases its calendar squarely on the great heartbeat of the Djel; hence the three seasons. Seedtime, Inundation, and Sog. This is logical, straightforward, and practical, and only disapproved of by barbershop quartets. — Because you feel an idiot singing “In the Good Old Inundation” that’s why.

reja vu: I’m going to be here again.

Younger assassins, who are usually very poor, have very clear ideas about the morality of wealth until they become older assassins, who are usually very rich, when they begin to take the view that injustice has its good points.

The late king had many fine attributes, but doing mighty deeds wasn’t among them. The score was: Number of enemies ground as dust under his chariot wheels = 0. Number of thrones crushed beneath his sandaled foot = 0. Number of times world bestrode like colossus = 0. On the other hand: Reigns of terror = 0. Number of times own throne crushed beneath enemy sandals = 0. Faces of poor ground etc. = 0. Expensive crusades embarked upon = 0. His life had basically, been a no-score win.

The fact is camels are for more intelligent than dolphins. — Never trust a species that grins all the time. It’s up to something.

Evil-Smelling Bugger was renowned as the greatest camel mathemetician of all time, who invented a math of eight-dimensional space while lying down with his nose closed in a violent sandstorm.

The rare perfume’s effect was achieved by distilling the testicles of a small tree-dwelling species of bear with the vomit of a whale, and adding a handful of rose petals. Teppic probably would have felt no better for knowing this.

To everyone without such a logical frame of reference the fastest animal on the Disc is the extremely neurotic Ambiguous Puzuma, which moves so fast that it can actually achieve near light-speed in the Disc’s magical field. This means that if you can see a puzuma, it isn’t there. Most male puzumas die young of acute ankle failure caused by running very fast after females which aren’t there and, of course, achieving suicidal mass in accordance with relativistic theory. The rest of them die of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, since it is impossible for them to know who they are and where they are at the same time, and the see-sawing loss of concentration this engenders means that the puzuma only achieves a sense of identity when it is at rest — usually about fifty feet into the rubble of what remains of the mountain it just ran into at near light-speed. The puzuma is rumored to be about the size of a leopard with a rather unique black and white check coat, although those specimens discovered by the Disc’s sages and philosophers have inclined them to declare that in its natural state the puzuma is flat, very thin, and dead.

The fastest insect is the .303 bookworm. It evolved in magical libraries where it is necessary to eat extremely quickly to avoid being affected by the thaumic radiations. An adult .303 bookworm can eat through a shelf of books so fast that it ricochets off the wall.

The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is well known that most people don’t listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they’re going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.

Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don’t upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and the chuck keys for electric drills.

Well! Another Book of Wisdom finished! Enjoy!