Chasing Down the Good Life

I would like to enlist your assistance and support in a Quixotic quest of self-discovery that I plan to undertake this summer. If you are like me, then you can't really stop your mind from thinking about deeply obscure questions about existence, meaning, and identity on a more or less hourly basis. And so when someone asks you a significant question like, "What do you think I should do? Take that job in Milwaukee or stay here in the position I already have at the bank?" You immediately begin to wonder: Is there such a thing as "should do" in this scenario? Is there such a thing as "should do" in life in general? If there is, where does such authority come from? And what does said authority have to say about all of the other decisions I make in my life? And, if you foolishly proceeded to mumble those thoughts aloud instead of keeping them between you and your inner-monologue, your present interlocutor may in fact realize that asking you about anything might in fact be a supremely foolish and time-consuming activity. The better part of valor is probably simply to respond: "Well, what do you want to do? Make a pros and cons list. And then tell everyone I solved your problem through reason and benevolence." Please know that if you are one of those people who have asked me about situations such as that listed above, that existential tumbleweed was certainly passing across the dusty road of my mind behind my glazed over eyes. It is nothing personal.

In short, I would really like to have everything all figured out before I even begin to deal with the small details of life. You know, get the big picture before analyzing the more minute aspects of its beauty. So I am beginning a concerted effort to track down the Good Life. And I plan to do whatever it takes to wrestle it to the ground and beat it into submission whenever I find it. This is not simply for myself, but I am hoping to create an extended sermon series on the topic once I have come to whatever conclusions I find. Hopefully it will be something that helps our church family at FPC. In the meantime, I am planning to use Paper Tiger Can't as a running journal of my quest. And that is where you come in. I would very much appreciate your comments, your questions, your meandering musings on life and its meaning. Please share those things with me as I make this journey, for the betterment of my expedition and your own. Here is my proposed methodology to begin:

As you can imagine, I will mostly be reading books. Old books, for the most part, but some more modern selections perhaps. Here's a rough list of my starting point:

From the Hebrew Scriptures/the Ancient Near East (including the Greek period)/New Testament:
Proverbs
Job
Ecclesiastes
The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7)
Epictetus: Discourses and Encheiridion

Works from the Far East:
Tao Te Ching
The Bhagavad Gita

Works from American writers and philosophers:
Henry David Thoreau Walden
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

Other modern works:
Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground
Albert Camus The Stranger
Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged
50 Cent Get Rich or Die Trying (jksers...)

A few caveats: 1) I have read most items in the above list already at some point, but I have never tried to synthesize any of it together into a philosophical outlook on daily life; 2) my ability to read Greek and Hebrew far outweighs my knowledge of Far Eastern or European languages, so I will need to rely on translations of some of the modern works and the far eastern selections; 3) I'm assuming that more will be added to this list, and some will be discarded throughout the course of this project. I fully recognize that such a limited corpus and methodology makes my chances of success limited at best, but the way I see it, my chances of success in anything in my life have been limited at best. So what else is new?

My goal, ostensibly, is to answer the question: What is the Good Life? Is it making lots of money? Is it having lots of friends? Or family? Is it helping other people in need? Is it some kind of combination of all of the above? Is it using the Shake Weight to get wicked cut and slay the ladies? What is the Good Life?

Well, what do you think? Do you have methodological suggestions for me? Do you have a list of your own that you think I should consider? Is it a blatant error on my part not to include The Simpsons in this corpus of great philosophical treatises and literature?

Just a thought to leave you with as we begin this thing together: At the close of Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, the protagonist Will Barrett stands in the desert trying to work out the meaning of his life. Another character, Sutter, whom he has appealed to in this regard throughout the novel, is about to depart from the hospital in which both he and Will watched Sutter's brother, Jamie, finally succumb to a long illness. As Sutter begins to drive away, suddenly Will forms another question, perhaps the question that, if answered, would put everything into place. And so he sprints after Sutter's vehicle. And there the story ends. If you are like me, a day has never passed in your adult life in which you haven't felt like Will Barrett chasing down Sutter Vaught in the middle of a barren desert with an inarticulate question that may be the key to your own existence.