Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [34]
“A beach house,” he said, “doesn’t even have to be on the beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,” he went on, “at boundary conditions.”
“Really?” said Arthur.
“Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.”
Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of thing he’d been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying really profound things about all sorts of stuff.
It was unnerving, though. The man was now stepping from pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of Arthur’s spatial universe. “Please stop!” Arthur said, suddenly.
“Can’t take it, huh?” said the man. Without the slightest movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the pole forty feet in front of Arthur. “You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual, I suppose.” He sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance.
“Where you from, boy?” he then asked.
Arthur decided to be clever. He was fed up with being mistaken for a complete idiot by everyone he ever met. “Tell you what,” he said. “You’re a seer. Why don’t you tell me?”
The old man sighed again. “I was just,” he said, passing his hand around behind his head, “making conversation.” When he brought his hand around to the front again, he had a globe of the Earth spinning on his up-pointed forefinger. It was unmistakable. He put it away again. Arthur was stunned.
“How did you-”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not? I’ve come all this way.”
“You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”
“Hang on, can I write this down?” said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.
“You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,” said the old man. “They’ve got racks of the stuff.”
“Oh,” said Arthur, disappointed. “Well, isn’t there anything that’s perhaps a bit more specific to me?”
“Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.”
Arthur looked at him doubtfully. “Can I get that at the spaceport, too?” he said.
“Check it out,” said the old man.
“It says in the brochure,” said Arthur, pulling it out of his pocket and looking at it again, “that I can have a special prayer, individually tailored to me and my special needs.”
“Oh, all right,” said the old man. “Here’s a prayer for you. Got a pencil?”
“Yes,” said Arthur.
“It goes like this. Let’s see now: ‘Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.’ That’s it. It’s what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.”
“Hmmm,” said Arthur. “Well, thank you-”
“There’s another prayer that goes with it that’s very important,” continued the old man, “so you’d better jot this down, too.”
“Okay.”
“It goes, ‘Lord, lord, lord …’ It’s best to put that bit in, just in case. You can never be too sure. ‘Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.’ And that’s it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part.