DEEP THOUGHTS

EWIK NELSON - Writer, 4th year, Music

"Moo."

SPOILERS FOR THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of my favorite works of fiction. It flaunts the limitations of medium (it is not only a five part trilogy, it was originally a radio series, then a TV series). With only this limited knowledge, it is already hard to classify. The absurdity of a five part trilogy is essential to understanding the spirit of H2G2. Absurdity is a good place to start. We are immediately brought to existentialism, where the absurdity of existence itself is the spark which leads to the realizations which existentialism consists of. However, we can do better and go deeper than existentialism; H2G2 is not as vapid as, for example, Rick and Morty. The nature, within our reality, of H2G2 is mirrored in the universe of H2G2 itself, as well as in an actual book called the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in universe.

H2G2 is comedy, British comedy, influenced by Monty Python and that general scene (Douglas Adams himself appeared in the Flying Circus, and was a writing partner of John Cleese’s), which is known for absurd and surreal comedy. The introduction of the story involves MC Arthur Dent’s house being demolished by the city council to make way for a bypass, followed by the entire Earth being demolished by the Vogon council to make way for a hyperspace bypass. An absurd and ironic premise. Little jokes like these throughout the series make way for equally absurd but slightly less comical, and more existential plot points. The plot of the first two books/fits/TV show centers around the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer to life, the universe, and everything. The story goes like this: The second greatest supercomputer in all of time and space, Deep Thought, is asked the question: “what is the answer to life, the universe and everything.” Deep Thought spends seven and a half million years calculating the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and reveals that it is, in fact, 42. His audience is naturally bewildered, but Deep Thought points out that this may be because they don’t actually understand the question they asked. So another even greater supercomputer had to be built to find the ultimate question to the ultimate answer, and it was called the Earth.

I always found this story hilarious. The fact that the answer to life, the universe, and literally everything was 42? Bonkers. Douglas Adams himself said that 42 was picked to be a completely random number, because that was the point. When I first encountered Zen Buddhism, my mind came back to this story, as it mirrored a Zen Koan. Let us take a look at a famous Koan: The student asks the master “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” The master responds: “Mu.” Mu, or 無 , means nothing. That is, the question was nothing, and the answer, nothing, incomprehensible. The story of the answer to life, the universe, and everything, to me, is a Koan. The point of a Koan is to show that the ultimate nature of reality is impossible to understand with the rational, symbolic mind. The story of H2G2 shows this beautifully. The reason the Earth (the computer computing the ultimate question) was demolished was not to make way for a hyperspace bypass. It was because, as Adams states, there is a theory, that if the ultimate answer and the ultimate question were to ever be simultaneously known, the universe would cease to exist and be replaced with something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

The question is never known. But there are moments of realization. Fenchurch has a moment of realization or enlightenment just before the Earth is demolished. In an alternate timeline she sees God’s final message to his creation “We apologize for the inconvenience,” and regains this realization, before being inexplicably teleported out of existence. Arthur himself has a moment of realization right before his death, indirectly at the hands of the (Hitchhiker’s) Guide Mark II. The Guide Mark II can be seen as the force which is responsible for keeping the Question and the Answer from being simultaneously known. It is the most powerful force in the series, as it can see the entirety of the “Whole Sort of General Mishmash,” a concept which comes close to many religious ideas like Nirvana, Brahman, Monad, or God, the unconditioned ultimate reality.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a brilliant comedy, but eventually the absurdity of existence forces it to face deeper truths, but we shouldn’t take those too seriously.