Quark, Strangeness and Charm - Part 7
Created | Updated Jun 1, 2006
The ramblings of the last sane me
Life can be very hard sometimes and it takes a huge effort not to let it overwhelm you.
Circumstances sometimes conspire to make a seemingly innocent decision turn into a potential nightmare. It takes a massive amount of will power and quite a cold outlook on life to cope with a problem like this. A cold and calculated approach to these things is sometimes the only way that a problem can be solved without too much personal pain. It would be nice if there was no pain at all but both you and I know that the chances of there being no pain are so remote that they verge on the unbelievable. So we make the choice and live with the consequences no matter how hard it is to cope and somehow survive and even prosper under these self imposed restraints which we impose on ourselves.
But we do cope. We eventually even learn to live with them and given time we can accept, then learn from them and grow stronger in the process.
The mind is an incredibly versatile and powerful tool, which used properly can achieve feats of fantastic proportions. It can also manage acts of extreme idiocy which are frightening in their complexity and depth.
Humans. Can't live with them, not allowed to keep them as pets.
Douglas Adams also wrote the incredible Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. It is incredible for many reasons one of which is the fact that he wrote it as a trilogy in four parts. Now I know what you're thinking and that is a trilogy is three parts not four and I am fairly certain that Mister Adams knew this as well but he didn't let that stop him. In fact at the time of his, depressingly early, death he was in the process of writing a fifth instalment of The Guide.
But the man never stopped writing, he wrote about everything that mattered to him, from the environment to the design of computer keyboards. He was a genius.
In the first book of The Guide one of the characters, Marvin the paranoid android, says to Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect
'Life. Don't talk to me about life.'
Now was he commenting on his own views of the world or was he commenting on the way people around him seemed to view the world? Unfortunately I will never get the chance in this life to ask him but who knows I may get the opportunity in the next one.
The main characters in the Guide are all incredibly complex in their relationships with one another and yet they all posses a kind of innocence which is almost childlike in its subtlety. In the case of Arthur Dent his innocence is vast. He is trying to apply everything he knows about our world to the universe itself. It's a big place to try and understand let alone apply the rules of one comparatively small world to. In fact if the universe is infinite then by definition this world we live on is so small as to be non existent. Does that mean that we are only figments of our own imaginations? If so, whose rotten twisted imagination created all the pain and suffering in the world today and would it take too much effort to make it a much nicer placer to live?
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