The Fifth Elephant
Everyone knows that the world is flat, and supported on the backs of four elephants. But weren't there supposed to be five? Indeed there were. So where is it?...When duty calls. Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork constabulary answers. Even when he doesn't want to. He's been "invited" to attend a royal function as both detective and diplomat. The one role he relishes; the other requires, well, ruby tights. Of course where cops (even those clad in tights) go, alas, crime follows. An attempted assassination and a theft soon lead to a desperate chase from the low halls of Discworld royalty to the legendary fat mines of Uberwald, where lard is found in underground seams along with tusks and teeth and other precious ivory artifacts. It's up to the dauntless Vimes -- bothered as usual by a familiar cast of Discworld inhabitants (you know, trolls, dwarfs, werewolves, vampires and such) -- to solve the puzzle of the missing pachyderm. Which of course he does. After all, solving mysteries is his job.
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- Or, as Terry Pratchett so eloquently put it in The Fifth Elephant:
> “Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.”
> Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”
- > Now this he understood. It wasn’t damn politics, where good and bad were just, apparently, two ways of looking at the same thing or, at least, were described like that by the people who were on the side Vimes thought of as “bad.”
— Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
- Ship of Theseus has many variations; one I like is from Terry Pratchett, regarding dwarfs and axes.
“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
- On the subject of "what to strike with", I'm reminded of a Terry Pratchett book-quote:
> [The werewolf] gave him a ringing slap and that would have ended it, except that it also pulled itself a little further up the tree and brought itself within the range of the Vimes Elbow.
> It justified the capital letter. It had triumphed in a number of street fights. Vimes had learned early on in his career that the graveyards were full of people who'd read the Marquis of Fantailler. The whole idea of fighting was to stop the other bloke hitting you as soon as possible. It wasn't to earn marks. Vimes had often fought in circumstances where being able to use the hands freely was a luxury, but it was amazing how a well-placed elbow could make a point, possibly assisted by a knee.
-- The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
A footnote from an earlier reference explains that:
> * The Marquis of Fantailler got into many fights in his youth, most of them as a result of being known as the Marquis of Fantailler, and wrote a set of rules for what he termed ‘the noble art of fisticuffs’, which mostly consisted of a list of places where people weren’t allowed to hit him. Many people were impressed with his work and later stood with noble chest out-thrust and fists balled in a spirit of manly aggression against people who hadn’t read the Marquis’s book but did know how to knock people senseless with a chair.
- I'm not 100% sure on this, but when I visited China (and my brother has said similar with Taiwan), the concept of old/existing was blurry - as an example a temple that has been completely reconstructed and doesn't include any of the original material, is still 2000 years old.
I think Terry Pratchett has a similar passage in The Fifth Elephant - this axe, over time may need a replacement head, or the handle may need some work, but it will always be the same axe that my father gave to me [paraphrased].
I guess, applied here, it's a similar thing to knowing you are male in a female body for instance. Morphology of the avatar in your head can be different to your external appearance, ie. you always had large boobs?
- Terry Pratchett riffed on a very similar theme in The Fifth Elephant about a 900-year-old axe: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...
