So long | 7 October 2008

A few weeks ago, I found a British box set of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a bookstore and brought it home with me, and having been reading it through ever since. Tonight I finished So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish — I was astonished to find that the entire book was basically a love story. But I’m astonished at how much of these books I’ve forgotten since reading them, what, like ten years ago?

I didn’t understand this passage when I first read it:

They looked at each other for a moment.

The moment became a longer moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.

For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who awakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savannah stretching grey and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.

He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed at her openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.

He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones till it now said something it had never said to him before, which was ‘Yes’.

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