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What is amusing about Deep Thought’s ‘42’ is not just the bathos of it

Like a bombastic speech, life appears to be meaningful but is actually vapid.

Michael Palin as an unctuous Anglican vicar in the Monty Python film, ‘The Meaning of Life’.

Yet this was true only of the work of art’s form. Since its content inevitably reflected the reified world around it, it could provide no lasting source of redemption.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, this culture, with its attendant ontological anxieties, had taken the form of modernism.