Original artwork, not a still
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy · 1979
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
A whole theory of human history in one joke: coming down from the trees was the original wrong turn, and every later fix, money included, treats the symptom rather than the sadness. It sets Adams's tone from the first page, with cosmic scale, a deadpan narrator and affectionate despair about progress. Readers quote it whenever civilisation seems to have taken a bad turn, and the follow-up about the oceans often gets dropped.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyShow the scene
This comes on the novel's opening page, in the unnumbered passage before Chapter 1 begins. The narrator describes the human race as a primitive, deeply unhappy species: most of the people on their planet were miserable nearly all the time. Many cures were proposed, though most of them involved moving small green pieces of paper around, which struck the narrator as odd, since the paper was not the unhappy party. Then comes this line, with a coda that some thought even the trees had been a bad move and that nobody should have left the oceans. Adams reused the sentence in the prologue of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984).
Sources (2)
- Wikiquote: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy1979 novel, Introduction section; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, PrologueReference checked
- Wikipedia: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel)Plot, first paragraphReference checked
Context reviewed
