Today I want to write about one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams. I’ve been doing some filming at home at my desk, and I noticed in the background I had a collectors edition of his most well-known book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, up on the shelf behind me. It’s emblazoned with a huge copy of his most famous saying, “Don’t Panic”. I love Douglas Adams. It’s one of the few things from my childhood (art appreciation-wise) that has stuck with me into adulthood. Billy Joel? Sure, he’s OK. Baseball cards? Yeah, best left behind. But I found Adams when I was very young and I’ve been entranced ever since. I loved the movie, I love the radio scripts, but mostly I love the books. My favorites of his are actually some of his less-well-known works such as Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and his nonfiction environmental book, Last Chance To See. I can’t say exactly why I like him so much. I enjoy the absurdity of british humor, such as Monty Python, but ultimately Python didn’t really teach me much about life (not that it was trying to). Adams teaches me something, a sort of resilience to absurdity. There is a depth of sincerity and profundity to even his most silly writing that touches me. The humor is sort of a sugarcoating around the pill of some hard lessons about life and how we respond to it. My favorite story is him writing about sharing a trailway station with another man and a packet of cookies, and watching him and the other man (a stranger) slowly and maddeningly take turns eating what he assumed to be his own cookies, only to later discover his cookies still in his pocket (and thus that he had been eating a stranger’s cookies). The story is simple, to the point, and left a deep impression: we think that the world has it out for us, but the truth is never that simple.
Anyway, R.I.P. Douglas. You were one of the greats.
