It’s wrong to think that the past is something that’s just gone. It’s still there. It’s just that you’ve gone past. If you drive through a town, it’s still there in the rearview mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn’t roll up behind you. Things aren’t over just because they’re past.
Real dark forces… aren’t dark. They’re sort of gray, like Mr. Grimm. They take all the color out of life; they take a town like Blackbury and turn it into frightened streets and plastic signs and Bright New Futures and towers where no one wants to live and no one really does live. The dead seem more alive than us. And everyone becomes gray and turns into numbers and then, somewhere, someone starts to do arithmetic…
You know everything I said in this post?
Terry Pratchett, as usual, said it better.
“You know those games where this ball runs up and bounces around and ends up in a slot at the bottom?”
“Pinball machines?”
“Is that what they’re called now?”
“I think so.”
“Oh. Right.” The Alderman nodded. “Well…when you’re bouncing around from pin to pin, it is probably very difficult to know that outside the game there’s a room and outside the room there’s a town and outside the town there’s a country and outside the country there’s a world and outside the world there’s a billion trillion stars and that’s only the start of it…but it’s there, you see? Once you know about it, you can stop worrying about the slot in the bottom. And you might bounce around a good deal longer.”