The old terror of human impermanence - it doesn’t get more serious than that. It was the terror of impermanence, the knowledge that all this would pass away, that a beautiful voice or a wonderful figure was something whose arrival you couldn’t control and whose departure you couldn’t delay.

It was one of the most ancient terrors, the one that meant that no sooner had mankind learned to walk on two legs than it dropped to its knees. It stalked the place like a great dark animal. (If this sounds like a take-off on the Phantom of the Opera story, it is - except, of course, for the witch part.)Īnyway, at one point, Granny is ruminating about opera as a performance is underway: Nitt, nee Agnes Nitt, a sister witch from Lancre who has come to the big city to become an opera star, and (b), incidentally, solve the mystery of a series of murders at the Opera House. Granny Weatherwax is at the at the Ankh-Morpork Opera House with her sidekick Nanny Ogg in order to (a) lure back Perdita X. He employed them to wrestle with the deepest human longings, dreads and values, such as in this scene from his 1995 Discworld novel Maskerade. Pratchett’s delightfully humorous and endlessly readable books weren’t only aimed at getting a laugh. In his more than four dozen novels, Terry Pratchett was often silly, witty, wacky and goofy.

Maskerade by terry pratchett