Life & Wisdom Quote by Douglas Adams

Adams pulls off a neat bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu: he frames skepticism not as a dry subtraction, but as a defense of wonder. The line starts with a soft, almost parental question - "Isn't it enough..". - which instantly puts the burden on the believer, not the doubter. If beauty needs supernatural scaffolding to count, then the imagination isn’t adding magic; it’s quietly confessing insecurity about reality’s ability to move us on its own.

The garden is doing double duty here. It’s the most ordinary symbol of natural richness - color, pattern, growth, accident - and also the kind of place folklore loves to colonize. By choosing fairies, Adams deliberately avoids heavyweight theology and aims at the mental habit underneath it: the compulsion to smuggle an extra story into the scene so the scene feels "complete". The joke is that the fairies are less enchanting than the need for them.

In the broader Adams universe - Hitchhiker’s, Dirk Gently, all that gleeful cosmological absurdism - this is his secular credo: reality is already improbable enough; pretending it requires invisible attendants is a category mistake. The subtext isn’t contempt for myth so much as impatience with the way myth can cheapen awe by turning it into a transaction: believe X, receive meaning. Adams argues for a tougher, more generous stance: let beauty stand on its own, and let our explanations be honest even when they’re unromantic. That’s not disenchantment. It’s mature enchantment.