He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his “Zen” method of navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) English author, humourist, screenwriter
Dirk Gently No. 2, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, ch. 4 (1988)
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Dirk describes this again later, in ch. 13:My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which looks as if it knows where it's going and follow it. I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be.
And again at the end of ch. 13:My methods of navigation have their advantage. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Quotations about:
automobile
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CALVIN: Hey Dad, how does a carburetor work?
CALVIN’S DAD: I can’t tell you.
CALVIN: Why not?
CALVIN’S DAD: It’s a secret.
CALVIN: No it isn’t! You just don’t know!
Miss Manners is amazed at the number of otherwise gentle souls who turn nasty when they are driving. And they all suffer from the wonderful, ostrich-like delusion that they cannot be identified because they are safely inside their cars. It seems silly to her to have to say what good driving manners are. They are the same as the simplest, most obvious of non-driving manners, except that each person is surrounded by thousands of dollars of treacherous metal.
Judith Martin (b. 1938) American author, journalist, etiquette expert [a.k.a. Miss Manners]
“Miss Manners,” syndicated column (1981-03-29)
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