Guest Blog: Excerpt from Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals
I haven't been giving myself permission to spend time blogging while I have a chapter of Blood and Tumult due back to lyster, but I didn't want a whole week to go by without an entry. Luckily for me, Twostripe has been reading aloud to Bug and me while Bug is eating, and we just finished Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett, which had an excerpt I thought was wonderfully appropriate for the blog. So, starting from a question by Glenda, a cook, to Ponder Stibbons, a wizard at Unseen University, here is some Discworld philosophy.
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"Can't you wizards do something?"
"Yes," said Ponder. "We can do practically anything, but we can't change people's minds. We can't magic them sensible. Believe me, if it were possible to do that, we would have done it a long time ago. We can stop people fighting by magic and then what do we do? We have to go on using magic to stop them fighting. We have to go on using magic to stop them being stupid. And where does all that end? So we make certain that it doesn't begin. That's why the university is here. That's what we do. We have to sit around not doing things because of the hundreds of times in the past it's been proved that once you get beyond the abracadabra, hey presto, changing-the-pigeons-into-ping-pong-balls style of magic you start getting more problems than you've solved. It was bad enough finding ping-pong balls nesting in the attics."
"Ping-pong balls nestin'?" said Trev.
"I don't want to talk about it," said Ponder glumly.
--
"Can't you wizards do something?"
"Yes," said Ponder. "We can do practically anything, but we can't change people's minds. We can't magic them sensible. Believe me, if it were possible to do that, we would have done it a long time ago. We can stop people fighting by magic and then what do we do? We have to go on using magic to stop them fighting. We have to go on using magic to stop them being stupid. And where does all that end? So we make certain that it doesn't begin. That's why the university is here. That's what we do. We have to sit around not doing things because of the hundreds of times in the past it's been proved that once you get beyond the abracadabra, hey presto, changing-the-pigeons-into-ping-pong-balls style of magic you start getting more problems than you've solved. It was bad enough finding ping-pong balls nesting in the attics."
"Ping-pong balls nestin'?" said Trev.
"I don't want to talk about it," said Ponder glumly.