Forwarded from another list: well-known science writer and media
pundit (and evolutionary biologist) Richard Dawkins (FRS) on
well-known science fiction writer and technology fan Douglas Adams...

>
>LAMENT FOR DOUGLAS
>By Richard Dawkins
>[5.14.01]
>
>This is not an obituary, there'll be time enough for them. It is not
>a tribute, not a considered assessment of a brilliant life, not a
>eulogy. It is a keening lament, written too soon to be balanced, too
>soon to be carefully thought through. Douglas, you cannot be dead.
>
>A sunny Saturday morning in May, ten past seven, shuffle out of bed,
>log in to e-mail as usual. The usual blue bold headings drop into
>place, mostly junk, some expected, and my gaze absently follows them
>down the page. The name Douglas Adams catches my eye and I smile.
>That one, at least, will be good for a laugh. Then I do the classic
>double-take, back up the screen. What did that heading actually say?
>Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few hours ago. Then that other
>cliché, the words swelling before my eyes. It must be part of the
>joke. It must be some other Douglas Adams. This is too ridiculous to
>be true. I must still be asleep. I open the message, from a well-
>known German software designer. It is no joke, I am fully awake. And
>it is the right – or rather the wrong – Douglas Adams. A sudden heart
>attack, in the gym in Santa Barbara. "Man, man, man, man oh man," the
>message concludes,
>
>Man indeed, what a man. A giant of a man, surely nearer seven foot
>than six, broad-shouldered, and he did not stoop like some very tall
>men who feel uncomfortable with their height. But nor did he swagger
>with the macho assertiveness that can be intimidating in a big man.
>He neither apologised for his height, nor flaunted it. It was part of
>the joke against himself.
>
>
>One of the great wits of our age, his sophisticated humour was
>founded in a deep, amalgamated knowledge of literature and science,
>two of my great loves. And he introduced me to my wife – at his
>fortieth birthday party. He was exactly her age, they had worked
>together on Dr Who. Should I tell her now, or let her sleep a bit
>longer before shattering her day? He initiated our togetherness and
>was a recurrently important part of it. I must tell her now.
>
>Douglas and I met because I sent him an unsolicited fan letter – I
>think it is the only time I have ever written one. I had adored The
>Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then I read Dirk Gently's Holistic
>Detective Agency. As soon as I finished it I turned back to page one
>and read it straight through again – the only I time I have ever done
>that, and I wrote to tell him so. He replied that he was a fan of my
>books, and he invited me to his house in London. I have seldom met a
>more congenial spirit. Obviously I knew he would be funny. What I
>didn't know was how deeply read he was in science. I should have
>guessed, for you can't understand many of the jokes in Hitchhiker if
>you don't know a lot of advanced science. And in modern electronic
>technology he was a real expert. We talked science a lot, in private,
>and even in public at literary festivals and on the wireless or
>television. And he became my guru on all technical problems. Rather
>than struggle with some ill-written and incomprehensible manual in
>Pacific Rim English, I would fire off an e-mail to Douglas. He would
>reply, often within minutes, whether in London or Santa Barbara, or
>some hotel room anywhere in the world. Unlike most staffers of
>professional help lines, Douglas understood exactly my problem, knew
>exactly why it was troubling me, and always had the solution ready,
>lucidly and amusingly explained. Our frequent e-mail exchanges
>brimmed with literary and scientific jokes and affectionately
>sardonic little asides. His technophilia shone through, but so did
>his rich sense of the absurd. The whole world was one big Monty
>Python sketch, and the follies of humanity are as comic in the
>world's silicon valleys as anywhere else.
>
>He laughed at himself with equal good humour. At, for example, his
>epic bouts of writer's block ("I love deadlines. I love the whooshing
>noise they make as they go by") when, according to legend, his
>publisher and book agent would literally lock him in a hotel room,
>with no telephone, and nothing to do but write, releasing him only
>for supervised walks. If his enthusiasm ran away with him and he
>advanced a biological theory too eccentric for my professional
>scepticism to let pass, his mien at my dismissal of it would always
>be more humorously self-mocking than genuinely crestfallen. And he
>would have another go.
>
>He laughed at his own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not
>to, but he did it with such charm that the jokes became even funnier.
>He was gently able to poke fun without wounding, and it would be
>aimed not at individuals but at their absurd ideas. To illustrate the
>vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us,
>because we are so well-suited to live in it, he mimed a wonderfully
>funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a
>depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the
>same shape as the puddle. Or there's this parable, which he told with
>huge enjoyment, whose moral leaps out with no further explanation. A
>man didn't understand how televisions work, and was convinced that
>there must be lots of little men inside the box. manipulating images
>at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency
>modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and
>receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines
>moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to
>the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step
>of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He
>really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there
>are just a few little men in there, aren't there?"
>
>Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the
>mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender (he
>once climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit to raise money to fight the
>cretinous trade in rhino horn), Apple Computer has lost its most
>eloquent apologist. And I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual
>companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met. I
>officially received a happy piece of news yesterday, which would have
>delighted him. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone during the weeks I
>have secretly known about it, and now that I am allowed to it is too
>late.
>
>The sun is shining, life must go on, seize the day and all those
>clichés. We shall plant a tree this very day: a Douglas Fir, tall,
>upright, evergreen. It is the wrong time of year, but we'll give it
>our best shot. Off to the arboretum.
>
>
>• • • •
>
>
>The tree is planted, and this article completed, all within 24 hours
>of his death. Was it cathartic? No, but it was worth a try.
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>----------
>
>It was announced today that RICHARD DAWKINS has been elected a Fellow
>of the Royal Society. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and the
>Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford
>University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene,The
>Extended Phenotype,The Blind Watchmaker, River Out Of Eden (Science
>Masters Series), Climbing Mount Improbable, and Unweaving The
>Rainbow.
>
>[Also appearing in The Guardian and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.]
>
>
>
>---Yes, what can one say?
>
>Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
>thy micturations are to me
>as plurdled gobbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
>
>Groop I implore thee,
>my foonting turlingdromes.
>And hooptiously drangle me
>with crinkly bindlewurdles,
>or I will rend thee
>in the gobberwarts
>with my blurglecruncheon,
>
>see if I don´t!
>
>
>
>
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Dr. Keith S. Taber
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