The answer to the question of all questions? – Laugh!
Douglas Adams in January 1985
Quelle: Getty Images
Douglas Adams had a head that could hold more ideas than there are stars in space. The technology positivist and animal rights activist became famous with “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Now he would have been 70 years old.
UAnd now for something completely different. That means that everyone who is reasonably familiar with Monty Python knows that, completely different from the way the world is, it will not be.
Maybe we’ll start in Tyrol and with the urgent appeal to just lie down on the grass with a few beers and stare into space, maybe right now and even when the meadows around Innsbruck aren’t completely snow-free yet.
Douglas Adams – in his early twenties, on a Grand-Hitchhiker tour of Europe, a six-foot-tall giant with a skull as full of ideas as the galaxy is full of stars – did that in the mid-1970s. And, with the “Lonely Planet” next to him in the meadow, wondering why there is still no travel guide through space.
I have no idea how he got it. It may have been because of the beer, but also because of an overdose of Monty Python, which he probably contracted in his youth.
In any case, he simply wrote one, the joke of which starts with the fact that “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, “H2G2” for short or “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, ended up being the only five-volume trilogy of novels in world literature that is based on based on a six-part radio play.
At warp speed, Adams’ guide went through the roof. No dorm without Adams.
Listen to your heart from the age of 50
It’s not actually science fiction. A galactic comedy in whose spiral nebulae philosophy and science, worldly reality, higher nonsense and all the rest are still wonderfully mixed up.
Apart from the basic resilience, the frightening topicality of this cosmos, the biography of the technology positivist (he considered the Internet to be the lifeblood of democracy) and animal rights activist has a never-ending lesson in store: around the age of 50 you should listen to your heart more.
René Goscinny fell off his bike at the age of 51 at the cardiologist’s, Stieg Larsson died climbing the stairs when he was 50. Douglas Adams, who after all made it to Kilimanjaro in a rhino costume to draw attention to the extinction of species, collapsed in 2001 at the age of 49 while exercising. Now he would be 70 years old.
Back to world situation. “H2G2” has an answer to that – as well as to everything, not just to the question of all questions. Or rather, a theory that could explain what happened to reality before we woke up in the morning on February 24, 2022, after Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
Marvin, der paranoide Android, , Zaphod (Sam Rockwell), Ford (Mos Def), and Arthur (Martin Freeman) in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”‘
Quelle: picture alliance / kpa
Someone must have solved the mystery of the universe. “There’s,” it says, “a theory that if anyone ever discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it’s there, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and incomprehensible.” A little further it says: “There is another theory, according to which this has already happened.”
The world is not funny these days. But if we stop laughing, even if it sounds sardonic, it doesn’t get any better. High time to pull out “H2G2”. And of course the Monty Python Complete Edition too.