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. 西海岸有个人独自坐在沙滩上八个小时来哀悼自己难以名状的损失。对于自己所失去的，他只能一点一点地思考，因为这整件事情实在是太巨大了，令人难以承受。 他望着长长的太平洋的波浪缓缓拍向沙滩，然后等啊等，等待着那件他知道什么都不会发生的事。当时辰到了，让那件事不发生时，它果然很识趣地没有发生，下午逐渐逝去，太阳隐遁在了长长的海面之下，白天就这么过去了。 那片海滩我们无法命名，因为他的房子在那里，但是那西起洛杉矶的绵延百里的海岸线，在新版的银河系漫游指南里的一个条目中是这样描述的：“糜烂、脏乱、蠢蛋、臭蛋，所有那些其它的形容词，所有那些烂东西，都在这儿”，而另一个写于一小时后的条目是：“就好像上千平方英里的美国运通垃圾邮件，但是没那么有道德深度。顺便提一句，那里的空气，不知为何，是黄色的。” 海岸线向西延伸，接着转向北边雾蒙蒙的旧金山湾，指南对其的描述是“一个好去处。你很容易就会相信你在那儿碰到的每个人都是星际旅行者。给你介绍一门新宗教就是他们问好的方式。在你住下来熟悉了这个地儿之前，最好对任何人可能问你的任何四个问题都答三个‘不’，因为那里发生的事情非常诡异，一个疏于防范的外星人很可能会因此被搞死。”至于那上百英里的扭曲峭壁和沙滩，那棕榈树，那碎浪花，还有那落日，在指南中被描述为：“赞。好东西。” 这片在海岸线上伸展的“好东西”中间的某处，则是那个心碎的男人的房子。很多人甚至会认为他已经疯了。但是正如他告诉人们的，这只是由于，他确实疯了。 在那么多那么多的人们认为他疯了的理由中，其中一个便是：他的房子很怪异，即使在这样一个大多数人的房子都或多或少地在某方面有些怪异的地方，他的房子也实在是相当怪异了。 他的房子被称为“疯人院外”。 他的名字只是简单的约翰.华生，尽管他更希望被叫做——而他的一些朋友现在也不情愿地同意了这一称呼——“痴呆智者”。 他的房子里有一大票奇奇怪怪的东西，包括一只刻着八个词的灰色玻璃碗。 我们可以一会儿再谈他——这只是欣赏日落的一个小插曲，而他正在那儿看着日落。 他已经失去了所有他在乎的东西，现在他只是等待着世界的终结——很少有人意识到那个终结其实早就来过，而且已经走了。
