Eléments de sociologie pratchettienne (2)

Où l'on découvre une théorie de la ville comme forme sociale qui n'aurait pas déplue à Simmel, où l'on devine la naissance d'une solidarité organique bien durkheimienne, et où l'on notera qu'un bon esprit sociologique commence toujours par une attention à ce qui est à la fois quotidien et caché...

Every day, maybe a hundred cows died for Ankh-Morpork. So did q flock of sheep and a herd of pigs and the gods alone knew how many ducks, chickens and geese. Flour ? He'd heard it was eighty tons, and about the same amount of potatoes and maybe twenty tons of herring. He didn't particularly want to know this kind of thing, but once you started having to sort out the everlasting traffic problem these were facts that got handed to you.

Evry day, forty thousand eggs were laid for the city. Every day, hundreds, thousands of carts and boats and barges converged on the city with fish and honey and oysters and olives and eels and lobsters. And then think of the horses dragging the stuff, and the windmills... and the wool coming in, too, every day, the cloth, the tobacco, the spices, the ore, the timber, the cheese, the coal, the fat, the tallow, the hay EVERY DAMN DAY... [...]

Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn't a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who'd never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent their life working for it. Thousand and thousand of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed...

...and gave back the dung from its pens and the soot of its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions and ideas and interesting vices, songs and knowledge and something which, if looked at it in the right lightm was called civilization. That's what civilization meant. It meant the city.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch, p. 389-390