As we began reading and discussing Goethe’s Faust in my freshman seminar class, I decided to raise an even bigger question than the ones that we had been tackling so far this semester. I asked them what the meaning of life is.

One student raised his hand and said “42.”

I had to explain it for some students. But Douglas Adams’ famous treatment of this topic actually fit what I hoped we would talk about nicely. Students proposed answers, in particular “happiness,” in a way that soon made evident that they were not at all sure what the question was – just like the characters in Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , who get the answer only to discover that they don’t know what the question is. We’ll be talking more about this next time.