Wiedergelesen:

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

Ich hatte schon fast - aber nur fast - vergessen, was für eine Wonne es ist Pratchett auf der Höhe seines Schaffens zu lesen. 'Small Gods' habe ich vielleicht nicht so oft wiedergelesen wie The Truth oder Going Postal, aber so wie alle richtig guten Bände - d.h. alle vor, sagen wir mal, Making Money - blieb er mir fast vollständig im Gedächtnis, mit einer kleinen Anregung ab und zu wiedergelesen zu werden. Das schaffen nicht viele Bücher.

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. AS if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time ...
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People have reality dampers.
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, the human beings faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of the plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They'd say "Wow!" a lot. And no one would do much work.
Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.
Part of the brain exists to stop this happening. It is very efficient. It can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels.
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That's what happens, Om thought. Being a small god was bad, except at the time you hardly knew that it was bad because you only barely knew anything at all, but all the time there was something which was just possibly the germ of hope, the knowledge and belief that one day you might be more than you were now.
But how much worse to have been a god, and to now be no more than a smoky bundle of memories, blown back and forth across the sand made from the crumbled stones of your temples ...
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It had been like this when his very first believer had been stoned to death. Of course, by then he had dozens of other believers. But it had been a wrench. It had been upsetting. You never forgot your first believer. They gave you shape.
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'I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts,' said Brutha. 'That way, everyone's happy. Think about it.'

(Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods", 1992)