Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphising animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions onto them, where they were inappropriate and didn’t fit.

I certainly don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world.

Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there’s a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don’t find out you’re in town. At least with the gorillas, you know that there’s no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity.

Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes.

Or rather, we actually block off any possible glimmering of understanding of what they may be like by making easy and tempting assumptions.

His sense of smell is very acute indeed. In fact, it’s his most important sense. His whole world picture is made up of smells. He ‘sees’ in smells. His nasal passages are in fact bigger than his brain.”

The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man. Not that we haven’t got a sense of smell—we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there’s a gas leak—but generally it’s all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that.

They were kept alive by a bunch of enthusiasts who felt that though the Nortons and Triumphs might be difficult and curmudgeonly beasts, they had guts and immense character and the world would be a much poorer place without them.

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.