“Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; See also: Raphael Lataster, “Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up.” Washington Post (Dec. 14, 2016)
My daughter interviewed me the other night for a school project about world cultures. She wanted me to talk about the rituals of birth, initiation, marriage, and death. Turns out, I had a lot to say about it. She needed to take the recording and transcribe what I had to say. She seemed nonplussed to have had to transcribe so much stuff.
Thinking about the interview, I got emotional. I brought feeling and emotional investment to what was really just a school project; imbuing the work product with a level of personal detail that maybe will be embarrassing to her.
And yet, I doubt that it will. At this point, these stories are all familiar to her. They are the family lore, like my Mom & Dad’s stories about “the War” were family lore to me. She digested my testimony with nary a reaction; the placid objectivity of an anthropologist in the field.
Family stories passed from parent to child like this, nevertheless, become the property of the recipient. These stories are plastic and malleable, owing less to the truth or my memory and more to the social, psychological, and parental needs of my children as they navigate life and one day raise children of their own.
...All my darkest hours talking like this... 