Whale's Meaning

I'm sure most of my readers have seen The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or at the very least have read the book but just in case, I'm starting tonight's post with a SPOILER WARNING.

Still here? Cool. One of my favorite scenes in the late Douglas Adams' novels involves a sperm whale improbably coming in to existence several miles above a planet's surface. As the whale plummets, he gains consciousness, and begins to question his own existence. He begins naming things and thinking about how excited he is to just exist and how much there is to look forward to. And then he hits the ground.

I've always liked that scene, and I'm glad it was among the ones included in the film adaptation. It's wonderful metaphor for our lives. Improbable though it may be, we come in to existence. We question things and learn, and at some point recognize that we have a lot to enjoy and look forward to. As time passes, hours start to feel like minutes, days start to feel like hours, weeks start to feel like days, months start to feel like weeks, years fly by like months and suddenly we're a lot older. The way time, or our perception of it at least, seems to go by faster as we get older, isn't all that different from falling, and the ground is a LOT closer than we think. I think it's great how Adams managed to catch all of that in such a humorously absurd sequence. And, like that whale, we're just as helpless to slow or stop our descent.