When the Hogfather-Discworld’s equivalent of Santa Claus-goes missing, Death stands in, donning a beard and a red cloak, and doing his best to bring presents to Discworld’s children, even if he finds it a little hard to adjust to the role.ĭeath is “implacable, because that is his job,” Pratchett once wrote in The Guardian. He looks like a classic reaper-a skeleton in a dark robe, wielding a scythe, talking only in all caps. One of Pratchett’s greatest and most beloved characters is Death, capital D, the walking personification of the end that waits for everyone. The Discworld novels are satirical, but it’s a kind satire, running over with affection for all the wacky, messed-up things in life. That is true, it's called Life."īut what set him above and apart was his sense of joy. "It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. Pratchett’s books were fantasy at its best. The distorted funhouse mirror of an imagined world can sometimes reflect our own more clearly than the most realistic fiction. Fantasy at its best is more than just escapism. There is deep truth to be found in fictional stories, no less so if they include witches and wizards and a flat earth carried through space on the back of four elephants on the back of a giant turtle. The books are funny, biting and, despite the many supernatural creatures that pervade them, intensely human. He was was known for his satire, using fantasy to poke fun at everything from Hollywood to Shakespeare to diplomacy. Pratchett wrote more than 70 books over his career, most of which were set in Discworld-a fictional universe where the earth was flat, the inhabitants were strange, and the situations characters found themselves in were oddly familiar. The BBC reports that he was at home, with his family. On Thursday, March 12, Pratchett died, as confirmed by his publisher, nearly eight years after his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. “A higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits,” the study said.“Death isn't cruel-merely terribly, terribly good at his job,” British fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett wrote in Sourcery, the fifth book in his long-running Discworld series, in 1988. In their case, they learned that even more people could be experiencing these flashbacks from cardiac arrest, when your heart stops altogether, or from other severe health conditions. They say these encounters are typically seen as hallucinations or illusions because research is so finite on the taboo subjects. In the U.K., doctors looked at out of body experiences (OBEs) and near-death experiences, too. READ MORE: What happens to your brain when you fall in love This isn’t the first time scientists zeroed in on near-death experiences and having your life flash before your eyes. Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "I could individually go into each person and I could feel the pain that they had in their life … I was allowed to see that part of them and feel for myself what they felt," one volunteer said. I was not in time/space so this question also feels impossible to answer,” one respondent said, according to the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper. “There is not one linear progression, there is lack of time limits … it was like being there for centuries. READ MORE: Hoping to stay friends with an ex? Here’s why you need to read this study first They couldn’t quantify how long these flashbacks were – short or long. The group admitted, in what felt like final moments, time was no longer a tangible measurement. This suggests that a representation of life events as a continuum exists in the cognitive system, and may be further expressed in extreme conditions of psychological and physiological stress,” the authors wrote.Īfter listening to the interviews, the scientists pulled together a questionnaire to send to 264 other people who also went through near-death experiences. “Re-experiencing one’s own life events, so-called LRE, is a phenomenon with well-defined characteristics, and its subcomponents may also be evidenced in healthy people.
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