42
The Answer?

Beachcomber – Daily Express – Friday 18 May 2001

The death of Douglas Adams last weekend, at the tragically young age of 49, robs us of a writer of true comic genius and outrageously brilliant inventiveness. It also leaves unanswered a vital question: why did Adams choose 42 as the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything in his Hitch-Hiker trilogy?

Douglas Adams’s own explanation was clearly not the whole story: “I wanted a nice, ordinary number; one that you wouldn’t mind taking home and introducing to your parents.” But 42 never was an ordinary number. Indeed, it has a long history of previous convictions as an answer to universal problems.

In the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, dating back around 1250 BC, you may read this: “I know the names of the Forty-two Gods who live with thee in this Hall of Maati, who live by keeping ward over sinners.”

The fate of the dead in ancient Egypt was decided by these 42 gods, each of whom represented one area of the country and whose demons could seize the souls of any who had sinned within their territory.

But it wasn’t only the Egyptians for whom the number 42 had significance. Why is the Senju Kannon, the 8th century 1,000-armed Buddhist goddess of compassion, traditionally portrayed with 42 arms? Why did the Tibetans revere 42 as a sacred number? Why did Balach perform 42 sacrifices in the Book of Numbers? Why, in the Second Book of Kings, do we read of 42 boys being torn to pieces by bears because they had ridiculed the prophet Elijah? How many lines of type were there in each column of the Gutenburg Bible? Answer: 42, which is why it is called the “42-line Bible”.

More secularly, why did the 19th-century science of Phrenology choose 42 as the number of personality traits that could be read from head bumps? And why was Lewis Carroll so fond of the number 42? In Alice in Wonderland we read: “Rule 42: All persons more than a mile high must leave the court” while the preface to The Hunting of the Snark mentions “Forty-two boxes, all carefully packed”. Did Lewis Carroll, who as the Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a keen student of comparative religion, pick 42 for its religious connotations?

Douglas Adams always maintained that he knew nothing of all this when selecting 42 as his answer, but there is one piece of evidence that definitely links him to the number. Long before The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when Adams was a jobbing writer, producer, actor and anything else that turned up, he had a small role in a training film made by John Cleese’s company, Video Arts. Cleese himself played a flustered manager, struggling with some problem. At the very end of the film, the answer is suddenly revealed to him. “I’ve got it!” shouts Cleese. “I’ve got the answer! It’s 42. Forty-two.” And, as he says it, who should be walking across the back of the set but Douglas Adams.

So long Douglas Adams. And thanks for all the Deep Thought.