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Mardi Gras is not girls flashing on French Quarter balconies. “To encapsulate the notion of Mardi Gras as nothing more than a big drunk is to take the simple and stupid way out, and I, for one, am getting tired of staying stuck on simple and stupid. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.” Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are fort, fifty, sixty. That is when time begins to pick up speed. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. “As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. I even felt 'pride' that I could endure, that I could be a good queen to you.Everything I did in this fucking place, even before I fell in love with you, was ." ” I sat at your side through things people in my world would find loathsome and I did it with my head held high. His torso jerked, it was almost imperceptible, but I caught it. I had a lot of people who loved me that loved me back." I sucked in a breath and then whispered, "But as much as your world scared me, as much as our practices repulsed me, I still chose you." I know that and I know that my life was good. He's wondering where I am and if I'm okay and how to get me back. He's out of his mind with worry, I know that too. He'll know the difference, though, I KNOW it. "He's alive and at home and living maybe with a fake Circe. "I thought, perhaps, when I learned I had powers, I might be able to use them to go home," his eyes flashed but that was all I got so I kept on going, "but not for good. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator.” What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser. In this, we don't merely write *about* a character - we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. If a character's life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author's eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own. Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.“When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.īut the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
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