The Real Meaning of Life: What’s It All About?

Nobody ever fails one of Herbert Ravetch’s classes.

Nobody ever says anything wrong or stupid.

Nobody ever takes a test.

Nobody ever gets a grade.

Nobody ever has the “right” answer.

Because there isn’t one .

Herbert Ravetch teaches the meaning of life.

None of this academic laxity and apparent philosophic hubris bothers Ravetch, who happens to be a college president.

He doesn’t ever grin or look embarrassed when he talks about his favorite subject. He does not think that those four little words--the meaning of life--are a sad joke for the jaundiced, often uttered in bitterness and spiritual exhaustion.

Original Yearning

For the 60-year-old head of Pierce College, there is meaning in the well-worn phrase itself.

In fact, he believes he has discovered a stress-free way of communicating the original yearning behind the cliche. At the same time, he can expose adults to classic literature and have a good time himself.

Maybe that’s the meaning of life.

But wait, perhaps it’s time to hear from Ravetch himself. After all, he’s the one who describes his job as mostly talking with people.

One day recently, Ravetch was sitting in a classroom with about 20 students, most middle-aged or older. It was the last session of, naturally, “The Meaning of Life Through Short Story.” Students were asked to give their reactions to the 21 works of short fiction by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, John Galsworthy and Franz Kafka.

A woman, who confessed to not being an inveterate reader, had just told Ravetch and her classmates about the connection she made between the character in a story by H. G. Wells and her own life. Her existence at the moment, she said, was much like that of the man tempted by a choice between uninspiring reality and the door to a magically different, untroubled life.

Ravetch responded, “I’m very impressed with your comments. So often it’s in the paradoxes and contrasts of life that we find value and meaning and new insight. Adam and Eve really enjoyed themselves in the Garden of Eden, but they would never have understood what you’re talking about. You might say, ‘Well, is that bad?’ But often, when we want to think about human life and the pain and the challenge and the obstacles and the problems, you can compare the life of an animal in a zoo or the life of Adam and Eve and the life we have and you can make a judgment as to which is the best.”

Parable-Like Approach

This kind of statement--off the cuff, parable-like, apparently open-ended yet conclusive--has kept them coming back for more Ravetch for four years now. During that time Ravetch has offered a variety of courses on a theme--”The Meaning of Life Through Essay,” “The Meaning of Life Through Poetry,” “The Meaning of Life Through Drama,” as well as the short story.

Ravetch teaches these classes at Pierce partly for his own pleasure, he said in an interview. But he added--there is no such thing as a simple answer from Ravetch--that he also was responding to student opinion from his days as an English teacher.

“Students were frequently coming to me, older students, and saying, ‘Gee, we’re enjoying this course on introduction to literature or this survey of English literature but we wish we didn’t have to do the term papers and take the final exams. We’d really just like to read and enjoy,’ ” he recalled.

Those wishes came home to roost when Ravetch was re-reading poetry he hadn’t looked at in years.

“These poets were knocking me out of my chair,” he said. “I was older and I was reading much more into the poetry than I had before. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to compare what some of these poets--Shakespeare, Donne, Dickinson, Frost--had to say on death and life. There were commonalities, but they each had different ways of approaching life and death, war and peace, love. Love was an enormous topic, especially romantic love, where love generates pleasure but also frustration and agony. And I said to myself, ‘I wonder if a group of people would be interested in sitting down with me and reading a series of poems on a given theme of human existence?’ ”

They were.

The first class drew 30 people, because “that title apparently had a hook in it,” he said. He has had to turn down people for later classes because he doesn’t want the group to get too large for freewheeling discussions.

Warmth and Willingness

Offered through Pierce College’s community services program, the only requirement for the eight-session courses is a warm body and a willingness to read. In the last class, Ravetch would like students to make a statement on what they learned from their reading, but they can demur and Ravetch will only grin and go on to the next student.

It is this aspect of the classes that satisfies Ravetch. He’s found that people react to the readings in surprising and emotional ways. They make connections between themselves and characters and situations that they might not make in a more rigid educational setting, he said.

This was evident on that last day of the short story class. A younger woman volunteered to discuss the stories but began to cry because she identified closely with a character who stumbled from disaster to disaster, trial to tribulation. Sympathetic classmates whispered to a visitor that the young woman had experienced a series of deaths in her family.

But while the stories evoked some pain, it was clear that most of the class agreed with Robert Hirsch’s jocular question: “Is there life after Dr. Ravetch?” Or Yvonne Grant, who praised Ravetch for “receiving everyone as if they had dropped a pearl of wisdom.”

Retirement Party

As already noted, life is partly about choices. Ravetch made one of those recently. He’s going to retire next month after six years as president of the San Fernando Valley community college. On Saturday, the staff, faculty and friends of Ravetch are throwing a retirement party to wish him well.

It will be the culmination of 35 years in education and he is leaving with mixed feelings. He will not miss the post-Proposition 13 consequences to education, “the grinding decline of resources that has been going on for the last five years for the community colleges,” he said. “But I’m not leaving because I can’t stand this anymore and I’ve reached the end of the line.”

The real reason is that, although he could certainly work for five more years or longer, Ravetch has decided to exit early because there’s more to the meaning of life than work.

“It’s easier really to stay,” he said. “Resigning, retiring is a problem, because the job has its own momentum. What am I going to do, what do I do with my life now? . . . From the time I was old enough to be aware of my surroundings, I’ve had a gentle but very firm hand in the small of my back pressing me forward. First it presses you to get good grades in school, then to go on to college, then to get a job. . . . I’m saying that in a way life creates for you, through most of your life, the conditions to which you have to respond. You have some choice, the kind of job you take, for example, but the overall condition is not of your choosing.”

Time to Take Control

Now Ravetch wants to take control of the time he has left, emulate Henry David Thoreau, who remarked that he had several more lives to lead to explain why he left idyllic Walden Pond. His father and grandfather, Ravetch noted, didn’t have such a luxury as retirement and worked until they died.

Most particularly, Ravetch is looking forward to not having his days laid out before him like jail cells to time.

“I think the person who retires and has everything planned out is making a mistake,” he said. “I’m confident that in a year from now or two years from now I’ll be doing some things I don’t know anything about today, and I think that’s the way it should be. . . . Without question, I’m going to be teaching--that has been the joy of the last four years. I seem to have struck a rich vein and if people continue to enjoy what I’m offering, I expect to be doing this for the rest of my life.”

Beyond that, Ravetch wants to travel, especially to the Orient which he has never seen; to read “several hundred sections of an encyclopedia,” explore his interests in astronomy, physiology, philosophy and the lives of great men and do a little writing.

An Inevitable Question

So, a visitor cannot resist asking, what’s the meaning of life for Herbert Ravetch?

Ravetch replied, “I knew you were going to ask me that.” He thought for a minute and continued, paraphrasing an ancient rabbi, “I would say the meaning of life is living and all the rest is commentary. But I have to amplify that. What I mean by that is that life is filled with paradox. Life is joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, success and failure, life and death. Somehow we have to live through all that in order to live. . . . Life is an extraordinary fatality that we somehow have been fortunate enough to have had provided for us.”