So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4)

by Douglas Adams

He was following the Earth through its days,

drifting with the rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight. Always the fracture kept returning, a dull disjointed distant ache.

There is a feeling which persists in

England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

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 until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “yes.”

“Life,” he said, “is like a grapefruit.” “Er, how so?” “Well, it’s sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together. A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth. Waves of joy on—where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.