A quote that has new meaning...
So here's a little quote from Terry Pratchett's Faust Eric that I've always enjoyed but as of late, has taken on a new meaning to me.
Hell, it has been suggested, is other people.
This has always come as a bit of a surprise to many working demons, who had always thought that hell was sticking sharp things into people and pushing them into lakes of blood and so on.
This is because demons, like most people, have failed to distinguish between the body and the soul.
The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn't. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a demon is all about, but since no one was suffering they didn't enjoy it much either and the whole thing was pointless. Centuries and centuries of pointlessness.
Astfgl had adopted, without realizing what he was doing, a radically new approach.
Demons can move interdimensionally, and so he'd found the basic ingredients for a very worthwhile lake of blood equivalent, as it were, for the soul. Learn from humans, he'd told the demon lords. Learn from humans. It's amazing what you can learn from humans.
You take, for example, a certain type of hotel. It is probably an English version of an American hotel, but operated with that peculiarly English genius for taking something American and subtracting from it its one worthwhile aspect, so that you end up with slow fast food, West Country and Western music and, well, this hotel.
It's early closing day. The bar is really just a pastel-pink paneled table with a silly ice bucket on it, set in one corner, and it won't be open for hourse yet. And then you add rain, and let the one channel available on the TV be, perhaps, Welsh Channel Four, showing its usual mobius Eisteddfod from Pent-y-gyrdl. And there is only one book in this hotel, left behind by a previous victim. It is one of those where the name of the author is on the front in raised gold letters much bigger than the title, and it probably has a rose and a bullet on there too. Half the pages are missing.
And the only cinema in the town is showing something with subtitles and French umbrellas in it.
And then you stop time, but not experience, so that it seems as though the very fluff in the carpet is gradually rising up to fill the brain and your mouth starts to taste like an old denture.
And you make it last forever and ever. That's even longer than from now until opening time.
And then you distil it.
Of course the Discworld lacks a number of the items listed above, but boredom is universal and Astfgl had achieved in Hell a particularly high brnd of boredom which is like the boredom you get which a) is costing you money, and b) is taking place while you should be having a nice time.
The caverns that opened before Rincewind were full of mist and tasteful room dividers. Now and again screms of ennui rose from between the potted plants, but mainly there was the terrible numbing silence of the human brain being reduced to cream cheese from the inside out.
Um.. okay, so it wasn't that little... but the things is... I know what hell is like. I'm bored as fuck. Every day I'm bored and it's that same boredom that stretches on forever and ever. Bleh. Anyways, I hope everyone liked it.
Hell, it has been suggested, is other people.
This has always come as a bit of a surprise to many working demons, who had always thought that hell was sticking sharp things into people and pushing them into lakes of blood and so on.
This is because demons, like most people, have failed to distinguish between the body and the soul.
The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn't. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a demon is all about, but since no one was suffering they didn't enjoy it much either and the whole thing was pointless. Centuries and centuries of pointlessness.
Astfgl had adopted, without realizing what he was doing, a radically new approach.
Demons can move interdimensionally, and so he'd found the basic ingredients for a very worthwhile lake of blood equivalent, as it were, for the soul. Learn from humans, he'd told the demon lords. Learn from humans. It's amazing what you can learn from humans.
You take, for example, a certain type of hotel. It is probably an English version of an American hotel, but operated with that peculiarly English genius for taking something American and subtracting from it its one worthwhile aspect, so that you end up with slow fast food, West Country and Western music and, well, this hotel.
It's early closing day. The bar is really just a pastel-pink paneled table with a silly ice bucket on it, set in one corner, and it won't be open for hourse yet. And then you add rain, and let the one channel available on the TV be, perhaps, Welsh Channel Four, showing its usual mobius Eisteddfod from Pent-y-gyrdl. And there is only one book in this hotel, left behind by a previous victim. It is one of those where the name of the author is on the front in raised gold letters much bigger than the title, and it probably has a rose and a bullet on there too. Half the pages are missing.
And the only cinema in the town is showing something with subtitles and French umbrellas in it.
And then you stop time, but not experience, so that it seems as though the very fluff in the carpet is gradually rising up to fill the brain and your mouth starts to taste like an old denture.
And you make it last forever and ever. That's even longer than from now until opening time.
And then you distil it.
Of course the Discworld lacks a number of the items listed above, but boredom is universal and Astfgl had achieved in Hell a particularly high brnd of boredom which is like the boredom you get which a) is costing you money, and b) is taking place while you should be having a nice time.
The caverns that opened before Rincewind were full of mist and tasteful room dividers. Now and again screms of ennui rose from between the potted plants, but mainly there was the terrible numbing silence of the human brain being reduced to cream cheese from the inside out.
Um.. okay, so it wasn't that little... but the things is... I know what hell is like. I'm bored as fuck. Every day I'm bored and it's that same boredom that stretches on forever and ever. Bleh. Anyways, I hope everyone liked it.