This is the title of the deliberately humorous sci-fi novel of a once very trendy author named Douglas Adams. The majority of we once hippies own the whole series, now yellow with age, gathering dust on our bookshelves...or, at the very least, we all have the initial volume in the series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Generally, neither I, nor anyone I knew back when this was written, would have gravitated toward this type of reading material, the premise of which is that a superior alien civilization is controlling all of human life, not with evil intent, but for its own simple amusement.
But as it turns out, this novel, and the ones Adams wrote as sequels, are actually designed as commentary on the absurdity of human society, observed through an objective perspective, i.e., an advanced alien culture. In other words, that's what makes them funny, as well as offering philosophic comment on modern society.
It occurred to me recently, that all writers do this, including me, though not necessarily via this particular genre. In fact, most of us (and I include myself somewhat tentatively in the author category), do not envision ourselves as aliens looking down on the earth with mocking sneers; but we cannot resist, nonetheless, imparting certain philosophic truisms via the foibles and epiphanies of the characters that populate our fictional worlds. The problem seems to be that the average readers (should you acquire any) tend not to notice your philosophic intent, much less the effort with which you put it out there.
If you've ever tried to teach Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to suburban Connecticut teenagers you would understand what I mean. Initially, the kids simply lose track of Twain's point because they are too confused by the fact that Huck (who appears to be only about 13 or 14) leaves a perfectly comfortable home to go live on an island where there are snakes and homeless people; and then goes rafting without even wearing a life jacket. The fact that this character drinks and smokes and is eventually guilty of identity theft, makes it even harder for the students to understand where Twain was going with this.
In other words, said teenagers completely miss the fact that Huck spends months running away from someone who, unbeknownst to him, is already dead. Not to mention when he comes to the conclusion that it is his "Christian duty" to succumb to government authority and turn in a runaway slave, he suddenly defies the law, and rips up the evidence, while declaring (rather than turn in his friend) "then I'll just go to Hell!"
I had more hope of an integral level of understanding from the foreign exchange students, many of whom came from quite philosophically based cultural backgrounds. Sadly, instead, most of them spent the majority of that literary unit typing Twain's carefully constructed Southern dialect into their translators with the inevitable frustrating results.
Then there is, once again, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Sadly, this is generally a book of which even teenagers living on Cape Cod can miss the author's point. But anyone who's ever tried to be a writer certainly shouldn't. What I didn't mention when I brought this book up before was (spoiler alert again), that after the old man gets back to the dock with the shark-chewed fish remains, and no one really notices or cares, he shrugs, goes back to his shack, lies down and simply fades away. Imagine, after all that fishing, having nothing to show for it, not even the appreciation for his efforts.
When I was a kid, we had a cottage on a lake where we spent all our summers, a true gift my parents (through considerable time and effort) offered to my childhood that I'm sure I didn't truly appreciate at the time. A significant part of these summers, though, was fishing with my Dad. The lake was stocked with bass that seemed to get more enormous every time we recalled the latest catch, most of which we unhooked and threw back in the water.
But my father would keep a certain amount of these fish, and bring them back to the cottage sink, where in a great flurry of flying scales and guts, he would behead and clean them. Then my mother would wrap the results in foil and resign them to the depths of our giant, free-standing freezer; storing them beneath the boxes of fat-ridden frozen burgers, nitrate packed hot dogs, and sugar-infested popsicles that compromised the summer diet of the average American kid in the 1960s.
The idea, of course, was that we would cook and eat the fish at some point, but the reality was that I couldn't possibly eat anything that once stared pathetically at me from the end of a hook, and that my father actually hated the taste of fish. And my brother, though he claimed to like the taste of fish, would generally arrange not to be home for dinner when my mother briefly considered thawing one that afternoon. Then, at the end of the summer, when my mother cleaned out the enormous freezer, the eight or ten frozen fish would be unwrapped and become sacrificial offerings to the local raccoons in exchange for them not tearing apart our trash cans once we had returned to our city lives.
It wasn't until I was significantly older and my parents, as well as the lake house, were long gone, that I realized what I liked best about fishing was simply riding around in the boat with my Dad. In other words, like many other things in my life, fishing with Dad was a lot like trying to be a writer has turned out to be. For the most part, it required a fair amount of effort (i.e., getting the boat in the water, rowing to a good spot, baiting the hook, making a successful cast, catching the fish and reeling it in, etc.), for something that produced very little recognition or reward, and in the end, served no real purpose.
Philosophically speaking, however, fishing actually did...have a purpose, I mean, in that it created some important memories for me...of summer, of my Dad, my Mom, my brother, and of what it means to spend time doing something that can be important to you, even if it doesn't matter to anyone else. It often makes me wonder that if I'd never been given this childhood gift (the summers on the lake, that is), would I now be able to keep trying to be a writer? To be able to just accept riding around in the boat, as it were, as the ultimate reward? We'll see.
After my brother and I grew up, and eventually after even our kids grew up, it became time to sell the cottage on the lake, and I went there one last time. There, I stood on the rocky shore and looked out at the tranquil water that held so much of my childhood in its grasp. So long, I said (I think actually out loud), and thanks for all the fish.
