Douglas Adams did more than make me laugh. He made me think. Without it hurting very much. He inspires a pursuit of irony as an art form, a way of finding meanings in life. I’d like to think that this bit from “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” indicates that he found some joy and meaning in his own life.

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.”