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Total perspective (arrow not to scale) (from "Total Perspective: De Botton, Douglas Adams, and God" by Nathan Campbell)

Trin Tragula, for that is his name, was a speculative philosopher who as also considered a thinker and a dreamer, and, by his wife, an idiot. He was the creator of the Total Perspective Vortex.

Creation of the Total Perspective Vortex[]

Tragula's wife used to complain to him 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. She would often tell her husband to have some sense of proportion, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in one day. In response to her pleas for him to find some perspective, he built the Total Perspective Vortex.

Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she would see 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 realised that he had proved conclusively that if life was going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it could not afford to have was a sense of proportion.

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