There are certain authors who delight you with the lightness of their touch. There is Douglas Adams, and there is Bill Bryson. For both, their love or joy of their pursuits shines through in their writing, passing on to you in form of good cheer and joie de vivre.
The Salmon of Doubt is a posthumous collection of writings by Douglas Adams, classified under the heads of Life, Universe and Everything. It has autobiographical sketches, essays, interviews and notes on books, and a partly completed Dirk Gently novel. The book is interspersed with brilliant morsels from his writing. I read most of it except the unfinished Dirk Gently novel. I do not know whether I wish to read it (the novel). Not what the author wanted to share perhaps.
Here, perhaps, it is worth quoting what Douglas Adams says of PG Wodehouse. It will pretty much convey what one can say of him,
"Shakespeare? Milton? Keats? How can I possibly mention the author of Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkins and Pigs Have Wings in the same breath as these men? He's just not serious!
He doesn't need to be serious. He's better than that. He's up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman and Louis Armstrong, in the reams of pure, creative playfulness."I think 'creative playfulness' is what defines his work too.
This is him introducing himself:
"I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud of - I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!"
His thoughts on perspective and the way we see the world. He is writing in late 90s, when the world was very different. But like some of the uncanny sci-fi writers (read Arthur Clarke), he is spot on stuff - the way cloud computing, the way internet has changed, about online advertising.
Here's him talking about Online Magazines (note, this is in 1995). After discussing an advertiser paid online magazine method,
"That's one model of how online magazine work, and it is, of course, absolutely free to readers. There's another that will probably arrive as soon as it becomes possible to move virtual cash around the Internet, and that will involve readers being billed tiny amounts of money for the opportunity to read popular Webpages. Much less than you would, for instance regularly spend on your regular newspapers and magazines because you wouldn't be paying for all the trees that have to be pulped, the vans that have to be fueled, and the marketing people whose job it is to tell you how brilliant they are. The reader's money goes straight to the writer, with a proportion to the publisher of the Web site, and all the wood can stay in the forests, the oil can stay in the ground, and all the marketing people can stay out of the Groucho Club and let decent folk get to the bar.
Why doesn't all the money go to the writer, I hear you (and indeed myself) asking. Well, maybe it will if he's happy just to drop his words into the digital ocean in the hope that someone out there will find them. But like any ocean, the digital ones has streams and eddies and currents, and publishers will quickly have a role finding good material to draw into those currents where readers will naturally be streaming through looking for stuff, which is more or less what they do at the moment. The difference will lie in the responsiveness of the market, the speed with which those streams will shift and surge, and the way in which power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing something useful rather than just having lunch.
The thing we leave out of the model is, essentially just a lot of dead wood."
- Wired, 1995
The joy is in his way of looking at things. The conclusions he draws, what he takes away.
"The thing that hit be like a thunderbolt... was that comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people could express things that simply couldn't be expressed any other way...
Creative excitement has gone elsewhere - to science and technology: new ways of seeing things, new understandings of the universe, continual new revelations about how life works, how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate.
Where, thirty years ago, we used to start up rock-bands, we now start up start-ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange. And one idea fails, there is another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading fast as rock albums used to in the sixties."
On coding:
"Whatever complexities a computer produces - modeling wind turbulence, modeling economies or the way light dances in the eye of an imaginary dinosaur - it all grows out of simple lines of code that start with adding one and one, testing the result, and then doing it again. Being able to watch complexity blossom out of this primitive simplicity is one of the great marvels of our age, greater even than watching man walk on the moon."And on how to see the world. The macroscopic, and the microscopic.
"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspectives tend to be. "
"The other thing that comes out of that vision of the universe is that it turns out to be composed almost entirely, and rather worryingly, of nothing. Wherever you look there is nothing, with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or light. But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like gravity and so forth. So that was, if you like, the macroscopic view of the universe, which came from the first age of sand. "
"The next age of sand is the microscopic one. We put glass lenses into microscopes and started to look down at the microscopic view of the universe. Then we began to understand that when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to be actually something, but only the probability that there may be something there."
From "Is there an Artificial God?" Complete text of this here.This, above is one of my favorite bits. About infinities within and infinities without.