Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

'Best not to wait for a curtain call, I thought,' Ridcully panted.

'Did you see me ... wallop the Queen with a horseshoe?' wheezed the Dean.

'Yes ... pity it was an actor,' said Ridcully. 'The other one was the elf. Still, not a complete waste of a horseshoe.'

'But we certainly showed them, eh?' said the Dean.

'The history is completed,' said the voice of Hex, from Ponder's bouncing pocket. 'Elves will be viewed as fairies and such they will become. Over the course of several centuries belief in them will dwindle as they are moved into the realm of art and literature, which is where the remnant of them will subsequently exist. They will become a subject suitable for the amusement of children.

Their influence will be severely curtailed but will never die away completely.'

'Never?' panted Ponder, who was getting winded.

'There will always be some influence. Minds on this world are extremely susceptible.'

'Yes, but we've pushed imagination to the next stage,' puffed Ponder. 'People can imagine that the things they imagine are imaginary. Elves are little fairies. Monsters get pushed off the map.

You can't fear the unseen when you can see it.'

'There will be new kinds of monsters,' said Hex, from Ponder's pocket. 'Humans are very inventive in that respect.'

'Heads ... on ... spikes,' said Rincewind, who liked to save his breath for running.

'Many heads,' said Hex.

'There's always heads on spikes somewhere,' said Ridcully.

'The Shell Midden People didn't have heads on spikes,' said Rincewind.

'Yes, but they didn't even have spikes,' said Ridcully.

'You know,' wheezed Ponder, 'we could have just told Hex to move us directly to the opening into L-space ...

They landed on the wooden floor, still running.

'Can we teach him to do that on Discworld?' said Rincewind, after they'd picked themselves up from the heap by the wall.

'No! Otherwise what use would you be?' said Ridcully. 'Come on, let's go ...'

Ponder hesitated by the L-space portal. It was filled with dull, greyish light, and a distant view of mountains and plains of books.

'There's still elves here,' he said. 'They're persistent. They might find some way to—'

'Will you come on?' snapped Ridcully. 'We can't fight every battle.'

'Something could still go wrong, though.'

'Whose fault will that be now? No, come on.'

Ponder looked around, gave a little shrug, and stepped into the hole.

After a moment a hairy red arm came through and pulled more books through the hole, piling them up until it was a wall of books.

Brilliant light, so strong that it lanced out between the pages, flashed for a while somewhere in the heap.

Then it went dark. After a moment, a book slipped out of the pile, and it collapsed, the books tumbling to the floor, and there was nothing left but a bare wall.

And, of course, a banana.

We are the storytelling ape, and we are incredibly good at it.

As soon as we are old enough to want to understand what is happening around us, we begin to live in a world of stories. We think in narrative. We do it so automatically that we don't think we do it. And we have told ourselves stories vast enough to live in.

In the sky above us, patterns older than our planet and unimaginably far away have been fashioned in gods and monsters. But there are bigger stories down below. We live in a network of stories that range from 'how we got here' to 'natural justice' to 'real life'.

Ah, yes ... 'real life'. Death, who acts as a kind of Greek chorus in the Discworld books, is impressed by some aspects of humanity. One is that we have evolved to tell ourselves interesting and useful little lies about monsters and gods and tooth fairies, as a kind of prelude to creating really big lies, like 'Truth' and Justice'.

There is no justice. As Death remarks in Hogfather, you could grind the universe into powder and not find one atom of justice. We created it, and while we acknowledge this fact, nevertheless there is a sense in which we feel it's 'out there', big and white and shining. It's another story.

Because we rely so much on them, we love stories. We require them on a daily basis. So a huge service industry has grown up over several thousand years.

The basic narrative forms of drama -the archetypal stories -can all be found in the works of the ancient Greek playwrights: Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles ... Most of the dramatic tricks go back to ancient Greece, especially Athens. No doubt they are older than that, for no tradition starts in fully developed form. The 'chorus', a gaggle of bit-players who form a backdrop for the main action and in various ways reinforce it and comment on it, is of Greek or earlier origin. So is the main division of the form of a play, though not necessarily its substance, into comedy and tragedy. So, possibly, is the invention of the huge stuffed joke willy, always good for a laugh from the cheap seats.

The Greek concept of tragedy was an extreme form of narrative imperative: the nature of the impending disaster had to be evident to the audience and to virtually all of the players; but it also had to be evident that it was going to happen anyway, despite that. You were Doomed, as you should be -but we'll watch anyway, to see how interestingly you'll be Doomed. And if it sounds silly to watch a drama when you know the ending in advance, consider this: how likely is it, when you settle down to watch the next James Bond movie, that he won't defuse the bomb? In fact you'll be watching a narrative as rigid as any Greek drama, but you'll watch anyway to see how the trick is done this time.

In our story, Hex is the chorus. In form, our tale is comedy; in substance, it is closer to tragedy.

The elves are a Discworld reification of human cruelty and wickedness, they are evil incarnate because -traditionally -they have no souls. Yet in their various aspects they fascinate us, as do vampires and monsters and werewolves. It'd be a terrible event if the last jungle yields up its tiger, and so it would be, too, when the last forest yields up its werewolf (yes, all right, technically they don't exist, but we hope you know what we mean: it'd be a bad day for humanity when we stop telling stories).

We've piled on to elves and yetis and all the other supernatural aspects of ourselves; we're happier to say that monsters are out there in the deep dark forest than locked in here with us. Yet we need them, in a way we find hard to articulate; the witch Granny Weatherwax tried to summarise it in Carpe Jugulum, when she said 'We need vampires, if only to remind us what garlic is for'. G.K. Chesterton did rather better when, in an article defending fairy stories, he disputed the suggestion that stories tell children that there are monsters. Children already know there are monsters, he said. Fairy stories tell them that monsters can be killed.

We need our stories to understand the universe, and sometimes we forget that they're only stories. There is a proverb about the finger and the moon; when a wise man points at the Moon, the fool looks at the finger. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, possibly out of a hope that this may be true, but the storytelling ape has a tendency to confuse moons and fingers.

When your god is an ineffable essence that exists outside of space and time, with unimaginable knowledge and indescribable powers, a god of boundless sky and high places, belief slips easily into the mind.

But the ape isn't happy with that. The ape gets bored with things it can't see. The ape wants pictures. And it gets them, and then a god of endless space becomes an old man with a beard sitting in the clouds. Great art takes place in the god's honour, and every pious brush gently kills what it paints. The wise man says 'But this is just a metaphor!', and the ape says 'Yeah, but those tiny wings couldn't lift a cherub that fat!' And then not so wise men fill the pantheon of heaven with hierarchies of angels and set the plagues of man on horseback and write down the dimensions of Heaven in which to imprison the lord of infinite space [78] Revelation xxi.16 gives it as 12,000 furlongs in length, breadth and height, or a cube 1,500 miles on a side. Noticeably smaller than the Moon. . The stories begin to choke the system ...