A brass magnifying glass lies beside a closed olive notebook, a pale feather and small leaves.

Original artwork, not a still

Last Chance To See  ·  1990

Douglas Adams

My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

Douglas Adams wryly describes his own unsuitability for a task, casting his total lack of expertise as an odd sort of qualification. The joke rests on the idea that genuine astonishment requires genuine ignorance, so his cluelessness became strangely useful.

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