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Terry Pratchett
Mar. 12th, 2015 10:28 pmLovely person, by all accounts; not a perfect writer, but a very good and important one; and, I can't tell if this is odd or not, but the thing I keep coming back to, and tearing up over, is that of all the fiction I've read, his is the one that gave me the most tools to deal with death and my lack of a belief in an afterlife.
“I know about Sending Home,” said Princess. “And I know the souls of dead linesmen stay on the Trunk.”
“Who told you that?” said Grandad.
Princess was bright enough to know that someone would get into trouble if she was too specific.
“Oh, I just heard it,” she said airily. “Somewhere.”
“Someone was trying to scare you,” said Grandad, looking at Roger’s reddening ears.
It hadn’t sounded scary to Princess. If you had to be dead, it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. But she was bright enough, too, to know when to drop a subject.
It was Grandad who spoke next, after a long pause broken only by the squeaking of the new shutter bars. When he did speak, it was as if something was on his mind.
“We keep that name moving in the Overhead,” he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly, and the everlasting clicking of the shutters grew more urgent. “He’d never have wanted to go home. He was a real linesman. His name is in the code, in the wind, in the rigging, and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’?”
—Going Postal
(Also, this is petty, but my anal-retentive self has been twitching all day seeing people quote variants of that. To be fair, “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.” is in the quasi-table-of-contents for that chapter, but damn it, I have searched the ebook and “Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” is not in Going Postal.)
