Total Perspective Vortex

I'm just going back over some old favourites, fiction-wise, and among them was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (version optional, but mostly the books). And I was skimming through it, and came across the concept of the Total Perspective Vortex. Which is supposedly the most horrifying torture device in that universe, which only one man ever escaped unscathed from, purely on the grounds that the universe he was in happened to agree with his truly monumental ego. But ... Um. I think I may have missed the point of the device. Because it doesn't sound like a torture device at all.

The TPV works by showing the viewer/torturee a virtual model of the entire universe (extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, but that's neither here nor there), and showing them their own impossibly insignificant place in it. The shock of which, the knowledge of how utterly unimportant you are in the grand scheme of things, supposedly shatters the viewer's ego and/or brain, occasionally resulting in death.

Thing is, though ... that wouldn't strike me as a torture. Because, ignoring the second part for a minute, ignoring how mindbogglingly small you are, the device shows you the universe. All of it. In its totality. The machine shows you all of creation, everything that exists. It presents, for your viewing pleasure, the whole universe.

Compared to that, isn't the fact that you may not be personally all that important sort of ... irrelevant? I mean, yes, you are to the universe as subatomic particles are to ... well, the universe. But. How does that knowledge compare to the knowledge that this, ALL of this, exists, and you now get to see it? Surely the scale of your own existence is sort of ... irrelevant? Compared to that? I mean, why would you care how small you are, when granted the chance to see, truly see, how vast the universe is?

Granted, I can still understand the device breaking your brain, quite possibly permanently. I can understand people who've been subjected to it never quite fitting the world again. I can even understand it killing people, from raw shock if nothing else. But ... if I had to pick a way to go, the option of dying while the universe in its entirity lays itself out before me, so close I could touch it ... I'd pick that. I might even pick that over the option of living. That would be ... the opposite of torture for me. That would be ... sublime. Heh.

*tilts head* Possibly, of course, I'm not quite right in the head. But still. It just doesn't seem like a torture to me. It just doesn't seem like something to fear, even if it turns out you're not the most important person in the universe, a-la Zaphod. It would be worth it. Whatever it did to you. It would be worth it.

Erm. Yes. Hehe. Anyway. Moving on ...