My fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez told our class in the early 1980s that we had to write our short stories over and over until they reached a pristine state in which we no longer had to apologize for anything in them. The stories had to stand on their own, beyond reproach.
I thought of Gonzalez’s words when I came across a section of The Good Life Method in which the authors present a writing exercise: You have to write an apologia, or apology, for your own life. Apology in this context doesn’t mean saying you’re sorry. It means “speaking in one’s defense.” Your philosophical core, and the actions that grow from it, should be things you can defend on philosophical grounds.
The authors provide several examples. I’ll mention three. Socrates defended his pursuit of the good life, a quest that embarrassed and antagonized the elite class. Augustine defended his religious conversion. Nietzsche defended his rejection of Christian morality and his vision of the Übermensch, or superman, a figure capable of overcoming inherited values and creating new ones rather than obediently accepting the old moral structure.
Your personal apologia contains three building blocks. The first is a story that raises the question of what constitutes the good life and suggests a possible answer. The second is an argument for your goal, or higher purpose. The third is the method—the means by which you intend to achieve your goal of living the good life.
The authors make it clear that having the correct conception of the good life isn’t enough. You have to act in accordance with your ideal. To make their case, they cite Aristotle, who warned about the chasm between belief and action. He compares people who philosophize without changing their lives to patients who listen attentively to their doctors and then ignore every instruction. The patients won’t become healthy, and neither will the philosophers. In religious terms, faith without works is dead.
As I consider the personal apologia and its three building blocks, it occurs to me that this exercise is essentially a Life Syllabus complete with Enduring Understandings. You identify the good life, establish the philosophical basis for it, and create a plan of action for living it.
That is your syllabus.
It seems reasonable to me that a young person should have such a Life Syllabus. Having one is surely more profitable than not having one. Living every day as if you’re making everything up as you go along strikes me as both depressing and futile.
I’m reminded of a friend who waited tables in Denver in the early 1980s. Eventually the job depressed him because, as he explained it, every day he was starting from scratch. The job gave him nothing to build upon. Every shift he constructed a tower of blocks, and by the next shift the tower had collapsed. He had to start all over again.
A syllabus, with its building blocks, promises the opposite. It gives you a journey in which one action builds upon the previous one. You are making something of yourself. You are flourishing. You are moving closer to the good life and, presumably, becoming a good person along the way.
For a young person, such a journey seems profitable. If you are in your mid-sixties, as I am, it isn’t too late. In fact, the matter has become considerably more urgent.
So with this in mind, I return to the apologia and its first building block: a personal story that gave me some glimpse of an answer to the question of how to live a good life.
The first story that comes to mind happened in 1981. I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder attending college in Northern California. Preparing for the late-summer Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School, I ate a high-protein, low-carb diet and tanned every day. In the weeks leading up to the contest, my clothes began hanging from my 180-pound, perfectly tanned physique like a bad costume. This necessitated an entirely new wardrobe, which brought me to a fitting room in a Pleasanton shopping mall.
While I tried on pants behind gauzy curtains, two attractive young women standing outside began arguing over which one should ask me out. Their voices grew louder and louder, which I interpreted as compelling evidence that I was a highly valued commodity.
This was my golden opportunity. My moment to shine.
And what did I do?
I froze.
I threw up an aloof facade so potent that it was like scattering banana peels under their feet and sending them sliding away from my presence. I appeared stuck-up, full of myself, and out of reach when, in reality, I was a frightened imbecile hiding behind a fortress of muscle.
In spite of my perfect tan and ripped physique, I was useless because I possessed the social skills of a wilted houseplant. All that bodybuilding had caused me to neglect more important matters: soul-building, social-skill building, mind-building. I was essentially a cipher. My chiseled body had done nothing to put me on the path toward the good life.
Disillusioned with bodybuilding, I hit the books in college and tried to develop my mind with the same intensity I had applied to my body. I read Nabokov, Bellow, Kafka, and Dostoevsky. I learned to play piano works by Chopin, Schubert, and Brahms.
And I became an annoying pseudo-intellectual snob.
Intellectual pride, it turned out, didn’t put me on the path toward the good life either. My existence vacillated between the despair of believing I was a misfit while listening to The Smiths and the arrogance of believing I was superior to “the masses” while affecting the pomposity of Vladimir Nabokov. I had traded one costume for another. Instead of hiding behind muscles, I was hiding behind books, classical music, and intellectual affectation.
I was a poseur, someone who didn’t know how to be real with himself or anyone else.
So what was the good life?
A life of authenticity, for starters. A life of humility in which I rejected both the hidden pride of despair and the more flamboyant pride of snobbery.
But I can’t pretend the road toward authenticity was a straight line. There were starts and stops, loops and detours, concentric circles and occasional ascents. I did become more authentic over time, but not because I possessed a clear philosophy or followed a carefully constructed syllabus. Life challenges and conflicts with actual human beings forced me to surrender some of the facade and BS and learn to respect other people.
Being respectful required being authentic.
This was a long, gradual process. It didn’t happen because I read this philosopher or that one. No single book cracked open the heavens and handed me the operating manual.
In the end, no philosopher was my teacher.
Life was the teacher.
And this brings me to a problem I have with The Good Life Method. I understand its impulse very clearly. Like these sharp, talented, well-intentioned Notre Dame professors, I love writing a course syllabus, which can easily double as a Life Syllabus. I love the idea of a plan, an outline, a sequence of building blocks, and a path toward the good life.
But perhaps it is too pat. Too tidy. Too much like a pretty package with a ribbon tied neatly on top.
Life may be too messy for the course outline. It may be too messy for resolution and absolute answers. As someone who struggles with my Jewish and Catholic background and remains agnostic about several enormous religious questions, I’m reminded of something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s inability to achieve religious clarity: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”
I know that territory.
I remain sympathetic to the goals of The Good Life Method. I want the Life Syllabus. I want the Enduring Understandings. I want the building blocks, the method, the telos, and the reassuring sense that one assignment leads logically to the next.
I’m just not convinced that life has read the syllabus.
And I have serious doubts that this method, or any method, provides a surefire path to the promised land.
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