Welcome to the Total Perspective Vortex. Enjoy your stay.
The Total Perspective Votex derives its picture of the whole Universe on
the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.To explain–since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way
affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory
possible to extrapolate the whole of creation–every sun, every planet, their
orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say,
one small piece of fairy cake.The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order
to annoy his wife.Trin Tragula–for that was his name–was a dreamer, a thinker, a
speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of
time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety
pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as
thirty-eight times in a single day.And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex–just to show her.
And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a
piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he
turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself
in relation to it.To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but
to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life
is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford
to have is a sense of proportion.
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