I'm going to attempt to post on one of my favorite collections of books. It's a big job - it's a big set of books. The complete collection of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There are only two authors I can read over and over without any ill effects. One is Nick Hornby. The other is Douglas Adams. I can see that they are similar in certain ways. Yet nothing beats the droll poetry of Adams, the pure Englishness, and the visionary quality of his work. No TV or movie version does it justice, though the movie with Sam Rockwell was okay. The TV version, even though it was British, and even though Adams helped with it, just did not do it for me. Which just goes to show that we all come to a story differently.

So to start:

This planet has-or rather had-a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

- The Great Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,  1979

Cowardly Lion quips:

"It's a mystery," replied the Lion. "I suppose I was born that way. All the other animals in the forest naturally expect me to be brave..."

"I know it," returned the Lion, wiping a tear from his eye with the tip of his tail; "it is my great sorrow, and makes my life very unhappy. But whenever there is danger my heart begins to beat fast."

"You will be very welcome," answered Dorothy, "for you will help to keep away the other wild beasts. It seems to me they must be more cowardly than you are if they allow you to scare them so easily."

You don't really understand without the books how very brave the lion is, and how frank Dorothy is.

"Yes," answered the tin man; "I did. I've been groaning for more than a year, and no one has ever heard me before or come to help me."

I had forgotten, until a recent re-reading, how many heads the tin man chops off.

Scarecrow gems:

"My life has been so short that I really know nothing whatever. I was only made day before yesterday. What happened in the world before that time is all unknown to me."

"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains."

"'Certainly; that is why I know it,' returned the Scarecrow. 'If it required brains to figure it out, I never should have said it.'"

The Scarecrow is wonderfully, blithely sarcastic.

"Dorothy did not know what to say to this, for all the people seemed to think her a witch, and she knew very well she was only an ordinary little girl who had come by the chance of a cyclone into a strange land."

Art by Alexis Vivallo

"The Witch gave Dorothy a friendly little nod, whirled around on her left heel three times, and straightway disappeared, much to the surprise of little Toto, who barked after her loudly enough when she had gone, because he had been afraid even to growl while she stood by.

But Dorothy, knowing her to be a witch, had expected her to disappear in just that way, and was not surprised in the least."

By the way, in the book, the shoes are silver, not red.

I thought that I would like to do a selection of passages from the Wizard of Oz. Perhaps it is an odd idea, yet I feel that certain sections, while not necessarily "quote-worthy", call to mind for me my memories of the story - not the movie, but reading the original series as a child. I am realizing more and more how profoundly the series as a whole impacted my imagination. In some ways I still see emerald vistas and cloud stairways, sawhorses and patchwork girls.

"All the same," said the Scarecrow, "I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one."

"I shall take the heart," returned the Tin Woodman; "for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world."

~ The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, originally published in  1900