The Number 42

"Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed,^[6] but he rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer^[7] on alt.fan.douglas-adams:

“

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.

”

Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'.^[3]"

                                    - Pulled from Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

I love this.  I find it incredibly inspirational. To know that as a writer I don't have to wrack my brain for the most brilliant thing I can think of.  To remember that often times the most simplistic, most ordinary of things, phrases, or numbers become brilliant because they are simply that.  Douglas Adams had created this set up that the univers's largest computer would provide "the answer to The Life, The Universe, and Everything."  I could see how as a writer this could end up seeming like a huge task especially if you're as neurotic as I am.  But he didn't get bogged down by it, he just simply wanted a number that didn't mean anything.  The brilliance, however, is that when you take something that means nothing, and give it meaning in your work, then your work's meaning becomes written onto that symbol.  You can't do that with a fork.  A fork means something and no matter how hard you try as a writer you can't change the meaning of fork.  Fork is fork and will always be fork, you can bend and squeeze it and move it from left to right until maybe

 in 300 years it means something different than it does today, but for now fork will mean fork and a forking will still be a forking.  Whereas, 42 means nothing, there's no hidden connotation of computer codes or 15th century jousting or any other reference anchor to the number.  Therefore, what makes it brilliant is now circa post The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, any writer who would use the number 42 will be directly referencing Douglas Adams and noone or nothing else.