Time & Perspective Quote by Douglas Adams

Suspense, punctured with a shrug: that is the whole gag. Adams takes the oldest narrative trick in the book - the dramatic pause - and uses it to reveal how often “drama” is just an author leaning on the reader’s patience. “For a moment” primes you for ignition. “Then” promises escalation. “After a second or so” adds the faux-precision of reportage, as if we’re in competent hands. And the payoff is a deadpan rug-pull: not only does nothing happen, nothing keeps happening. The line doesn’t merely describe inaction; it performs it, stretching a beat of emptiness into a miniature farce.

The subtext is quietly contemptuous of grandeur. Sci-fi, especially, loves countdowns, cosmic stakes, and the sense that the universe is always about to do something important. Adams suggests the opposite: the universe is indifferent, delays are arbitrary, and our urge to read meaning into the pause is adorable. By repeating “nothing” while changing the surrounding scaffolding, he parodies how language manufactures momentum. The sentence has movement; the event does not.

Contextually it’s pure Hitchhiker’s-era Adams, where bureaucracy, physics, and narrative convention are all equally ripe for deflation. It also lands as a sly meta-joke about time itself: we experience “something” largely by packaging it into story beats. Strip the beat of its expected reward and you’re left with the comic truth that waiting is one of the most common plots in modern life.