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Started reading
October 31, 2023
The President in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.
Trilllian had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.
He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
“Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.”
There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we? I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?” “That’s right,” shouted Vroomfondel, “we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don’t get up and go to work?
“Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.”
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
