#76, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

"The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy"
Douglas Adams

I read this book when I was a teenager. I have friends who used to quote bits of it to me, and many moments in it have become a part of my regular lexicon. It has so many memorable parts! That being said, coming back to it 15 years later, I did not enjoy it as much as I thought I remembered. The jokes are still pretty good, although I think some of my grins were partly due to nostalgia bias. I tend to enjoy British humor, which is characteristically dry. Adams is drier than most, and gives his nonsensical phrases in absolute and unbroken deadpan. He'll pop off with something completely out of the blue and then just move on like it was nothing, and that is the key to his style. It's pretty good, as far as it goes. The story is quite wandering. Adams is not concerned with drafting a perfect archetypal story of rising and falling tension, good and evil. He needs none of that. The story just goes until it is over, almost but not quite like a stream-of-consciousness narrative, with many detours and odd asides. That's just how he writes.

The philosophy behind this book was my big takeaway, however, much more than the jokes. Adams was, in his words, a "radical atheist." I see this on almost every page of this book. His militant and piercing hatred of Christianity, his scorn for God and even the concept of God are plainly seen, and intentionally threaded into the story. Absolute meaninglessness is, in fact, the main theme of the book. The phrasing, the words, the non sequiturs--yes, they are funny, but they are also calculated to lay a foundation of meaningless nothingness (if that sentence is syntactically possible). An obvious example of this nihilistic worldview is the central joke of the book: the search for The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. The answer, given after 7.5 million years of calculation by the supercomputer Deep Thought, is, of course, "Forty-two." Such an absurd "answer" is a wonderful joke, we think. What a foolish way to spend 7.5 million years. We discover that the Earth was actually a giant computer constructed to calculate The Ultimate Question, the Question that corresponds to the Answer already given. It is at this point that the joke stops being funny, and we realize in Adams' two potential Questions that the implications are deadly serious: either "How many roads must a man walk down?" or "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?"Both of these are nonsense.  That is the point. The answer to the universe is meaningless. The question is meaningless. Everything is absurd and random. Chance is god, impersonal and uncaring.

As Ford Prefect says, "Drink up. The world's about to end."A paraphrase and thematic twisting of 1 Corinthians 15:32. But if the world does end, Adams will tell us that no one cares. It does not ultimately matter if the world exists or if it, and everything on it, vanishes in the next five minutes. There are no answers, no questions, no reasons, and no meaning. That is not funny. It is heartbreaking.