Looking at Life Off Kilter

Let’s back up a bit. Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett, beings with Death being fired from his job. Apparently Death had developed too much of a personality (he is one of the most amusing characters in Discworld, after all), so the Powers That Be decide to forcibly retire him, both from his job and his existence. But, alas, you don’t just replace Death with any old person, so it takes some time for a new Death to appear. What happens in the meantime?

The hour glass for the old wizard Windle Poon’s life runs out during the interregnum. But, if there is no Death, what happens when you die? Fortunately, you don’t have to experiment yourself; it turns out you become something not quite like a zombie, not really dead, but also not really undead, just sort of in between dead and undead.

There is one huge advantage to this state (well besides the opportunity to munch on celery in your coffin): you notice things.

And it suddenly dawned on the late Windle Poons that there was no such thing as somebody else’s problem, and that just when you thought the world had pushed you aside it turned out to be full of strangeness. He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.

There is much wisdom in Windle’s post-life pre-death reflections. Life is indeed strange, but we the living have a hard time noticing it because we are too busy with the mundane details of living.

Living does involve a lot of mundane things. Eating, Sleeping, Bathing, Dressing, and Tearing Unwanted Plants out of the Ground. Much like a Left Guard or a Third Basemen, when you are in the Game of Life, you have a hard the seeing the whole game. Marching along in our tiny little ruts in life, we do indeed have a hard time seeing how our little ruts fit into the larger traffic system.

Thoreau screamed at you about the life of quiet desperation you are leading. He wants you to break our patterns. Go life in a cabin in the woods for a couple of years. Or whatever. Just get out of your rut. You read Thoreau and sigh, “That seems a tad bit extreme.”

Terry Pratchett has a simpler solution. Just step outside yourself and notice that life is strange and wonderful. For a moment, look past all the boring and mundane things you have to do today, and look around until you notice something really, really odd. Think about that oddity for a bit. Then, laugh.

This is exactly what Pratchett does in every one of the Discworld novels. Take some really boring part of life or some well-known story, and turn it ever so slightly until it is not quite on its normal axis and then look at it afresh. It will look a bit funny when you do that.

Consider: have you ever really thought about shopping carts? Have you ever noticed how they are constantly trying to escape the buildings in which they are housed, rushing out to vehicular traffic hubs perhaps in the vague hope that maybe they will be liberated by a passing vehicle or pedestrian? Or maybe some of them are hoping to be struck by a vehicle so they can end their miserable lives. Have you ever realized that the Store sends out humans to round up the escaped shopping carts and connect them in a chain gang and forcibly move them back into slavery inside the Store where they will be eternally pushed around by people who never give a moment’s thought to the welfare of the shopping cart? Pratchett noticed that. Think about that the next time you are in a Store. Imagine your shopping cart is sentient. Really, try it out. What is the harm in imagining this? Are you afraid you might laugh?

Life doesn’t have to be boring and mundane. No matter what you are doing today, you can always look at it a bit off kilter and laugh. It is a much better way to go through life, after all. And it may even have Divine Sanction. As Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy:

And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

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