#RIPTerryJones, Hermit of the Juniper, Mum of Brian
What
are we but the culmination of idle hours, flailing limbs, and rampant
cogitations? In the misery of to-day, in the whirling entropy of grief, I
have accidentally remembered that all those I love named Terry are now
gone.
Terrance Hanbury White. Sir Terry Pratchett. Terry Jones.
Heaven, or something like it, must be a grand old place, with such a collection of giants to furnish its halls, the palladiums to guard its troves and offer pedantic tirades to all. Of course nobody is educated nowadays; all the best loresmen are dead. And everyone wonders why death is so attractive as of late. Being educated by the elites ought to always be fashionable, regardless of whether they still be alive. It is hardly my fault they all decided to die, and therefore I should not be blamed for being to follow. Emulate your heroes how you can.
Being left to wallow in their legacies, to peruse the moderate-sized mountain of books each has left behind, is an agony in itself: it is Schrodinger’s Egrimony, wanting to open the books and keep them closed at the same time, knowing that either way will produce waterworks, and I will lose the battle of composure I am so desperately good at maintaining.
Bereavement is a fickle beast, one that comes and goes like the bad company of a horrid houseguest, showing up when it likes and leaving just as the tea is finally laid out. Compunction is not something I entertain often, but in the case of the Terrys, the regret I am made to suffer under becomes worse and worse: I was never able to meet T.H. White due to his having died long before I was born, I never got the opportunity to write to Sir Terry to tell him how much I admired him, and to Terry Jones, who decided he had done with this place only yesterday, I dedicated a book, one which was written last year and will only be published later in the summer. There my regret is worst of all: he was alive, I wrote to express my appreciation for his immense contribution to the world, but he was too ill to read it.
Time is such a villain.
A man who lived many medieval lives and was sentenced to silence, Terry Jones was an enormous part of my young life, more perhaps than I hitherto realized. He wrote and directed the films I watched, authored the stories I read-- he made light of the serious, a trend I practice now in part because of him. It is a cruel trick of Life to bargain with the gifts it gives, to supply the cure for the morbs and megrims only make a man whom so many loved suffer to the last. There is no impartiality in this game; that would imply an arbiter. And so we are meant to bear the sithe and bang on as we can, at first lifesome and then life-weary, making each other laugh or cry or both at once, and we are supposed to act as though we adore it, as though life is all cakes and ale. Here is a wretched place, improved by the Terrys born into it and made worse again by their absence.
I have gone beyond the floodgates; I am all salt and no sorrow, idle and listless in the stupidity that grief affords. Nature is most amused, I see, taking away all the genius it has created, to plant the seeds in another row, the Furrow of the Future: the Terrys of Springtime, a crop the poor farmers of the here and now have no idea how to nourish.
Terrance Hanbury White. Sir Terry Pratchett. Terry Jones.
Heaven, or something like it, must be a grand old place, with such a collection of giants to furnish its halls, the palladiums to guard its troves and offer pedantic tirades to all. Of course nobody is educated nowadays; all the best loresmen are dead. And everyone wonders why death is so attractive as of late. Being educated by the elites ought to always be fashionable, regardless of whether they still be alive. It is hardly my fault they all decided to die, and therefore I should not be blamed for being to follow. Emulate your heroes how you can.
Being left to wallow in their legacies, to peruse the moderate-sized mountain of books each has left behind, is an agony in itself: it is Schrodinger’s Egrimony, wanting to open the books and keep them closed at the same time, knowing that either way will produce waterworks, and I will lose the battle of composure I am so desperately good at maintaining.
Bereavement is a fickle beast, one that comes and goes like the bad company of a horrid houseguest, showing up when it likes and leaving just as the tea is finally laid out. Compunction is not something I entertain often, but in the case of the Terrys, the regret I am made to suffer under becomes worse and worse: I was never able to meet T.H. White due to his having died long before I was born, I never got the opportunity to write to Sir Terry to tell him how much I admired him, and to Terry Jones, who decided he had done with this place only yesterday, I dedicated a book, one which was written last year and will only be published later in the summer. There my regret is worst of all: he was alive, I wrote to express my appreciation for his immense contribution to the world, but he was too ill to read it.
Time is such a villain.
A man who lived many medieval lives and was sentenced to silence, Terry Jones was an enormous part of my young life, more perhaps than I hitherto realized. He wrote and directed the films I watched, authored the stories I read-- he made light of the serious, a trend I practice now in part because of him. It is a cruel trick of Life to bargain with the gifts it gives, to supply the cure for the morbs and megrims only make a man whom so many loved suffer to the last. There is no impartiality in this game; that would imply an arbiter. And so we are meant to bear the sithe and bang on as we can, at first lifesome and then life-weary, making each other laugh or cry or both at once, and we are supposed to act as though we adore it, as though life is all cakes and ale. Here is a wretched place, improved by the Terrys born into it and made worse again by their absence.
I have gone beyond the floodgates; I am all salt and no sorrow, idle and listless in the stupidity that grief affords. Nature is most amused, I see, taking away all the genius it has created, to plant the seeds in another row, the Furrow of the Future: the Terrys of Springtime, a crop the poor farmers of the here and now have no idea how to nourish.
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