Eight hours West sat a man alone on a beach mourning an inexplicable loss. He could only think of his loss in little packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great to be borne. He watched the long slow Pacific waves come in along the sand, and waited and waited for the nothing that he knew was about to happen. As the time came for it not to happen, it duly didn’t happen and so the afternoon wore itself away and the sun dropped beneath the long line of sea, and the day was gone. The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds of miles of coastline that first runs west from Los Angeles, which is described in the new edition of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as “junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what’s that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo”, and in another, written only hours later as “being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow.” The coastline runs west, and then turns north up to the misty bay of San Francisco, which the Guide describes as a “good place to go. It’s very easy to believe that everyone you meet there is also a space traveller. Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying “hi”. Until you’ve settled in and got the hang of the place it is best to say “no” to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of”. The hundreds of curling miles of cliffs and sand, palm trees, breakers and sunsets are described in the Guide as “Boffo. A good one.” And somewhere on this good boffo stretch of coastline lay the house of this inconsolable man, a man whom many regarded as being insane. But this was only, as he would tell people, because he was. One of the many many reasons why people thought him insane was because of the peculiarity of his house which, even in a land where most people’s houses were peculiar in one way or another, was quite extreme in his peculiarness. His house was called The Outside of the Asylum. His name was simply John Watson, though he preferred to be called and some of his friends had now reluctantly agreed to this Wonko the Sane. In his house were a number of strange things, including a grey glass bowl with eight words engraved upon it. We can talk of him much later on this is just an interlude to watch the sun go down and to say that he was there watching it. He had lost everything he cared for, and was now simply waiting for the end of the world little realizing that it had already been and gone. 西海岸有個人獨自坐在沙灘上八個小時來哀悼自己難以名狀的損失。對於自己所失去的，他只能一點一點地思考，因爲這整件事情實在是太巨大了，令人難以承受。 他望着長長的太平洋的波浪緩緩拍向沙灘，然後等啊等，等待着那件他知道什麼都不會發生的事。當時辰到了，讓那件事不發生時，它果然很識趣地沒有發生，下午逐漸逝去，太陽隱遁在了長長的海面之下，白天就這麼過去了。 那片海灘我們無法命名，因爲他的房子在那裏，但是那西起洛杉磯的綿延百里的海岸線，在新版的銀河系漫遊指南里的一個條目中是這樣描述的：“糜爛、髒亂、蠢蛋、臭蛋，所有那些其它的形容詞，所有那些爛東西，都在這兒”，而另一個寫於一小時後的條目是：“就好像上千平方英里的美國運通垃圾郵件，但是沒那麼有道德深度。順便提一句，那裏的空氣，不知爲何，是黃色的。” 海岸線向西延伸，接着轉向北邊霧濛濛的舊金山灣，指南對其的描述是“一個好去處。你很容易就會相信你在那兒碰到的每個人都是星際旅行者。給你介紹一門新宗教就是他們問好的方式。在你住下來熟悉了這個地兒之前，最好對任何人可能問你的任何四個問題都答三個‘不’，因爲那裏發生的事情非常詭異，一個疏於防範的外星人很可能會因此被搞死。”至於那上百英里的扭曲峭壁和沙灘，那棕櫚樹，那碎浪花，還有那落日，在指南中被描述爲：“贊。好東西。” 這片在海岸線上伸展的“好東西”中間的某處，則是那個心碎的男人的房子。很多人甚至會認爲他已經瘋了。但是正如他告訴人們的，這只是由於，他確實瘋了。 在那麼多那麼多的人們認爲他瘋了的理由中，其中一個便是：他的房子很怪異，即使在這樣一個大多數人的房子都或多或少地在某方面有些怪異的地方，他的房子也實在是相當怪異了。 他的房子被稱爲“瘋人院外”。 他的名字只是簡單的約翰.華生，儘管他更希望被叫做——而他的一些朋友現在也不情願地同意了這一稱呼——“癡呆智者”。 他的房子裏有一大票奇奇怪怪的東西，包括一隻刻着八個詞的灰色玻璃碗。 我們可以一會兒再談他——這只是欣賞日落的一個小插曲，而他正在那兒看着日落。 他已經失去了所有他在乎的東西，現在他只是等待着世界的終結——很少有人意識到那個終結其實早就來過，而且已經走了。
