The good stuff, or, why did the chicken cross the road?

A student from my January philosophy course recently came by the office to follow up on some lingering questions. It’s always a good sign when a student pursues learning after the conclusion a course. It hints that one has achieved a measure of retention, sustained interest, and perhaps tweeked at least a curiosity if not a thirst for learning. It seems to me that the nature of studying enduring subject matter (philosophy, history, etc.) tends to have that effect more so than the more entertaining “designer” courses teachers often foist on their undiscerning students.

My student’s approach was telling. She confessed to becoming aware of her need to read more of “the good stuff. You, know, the classics,” as she put it. She had come up short against her ignorance (a first step in the learning process) and was aware that she didn’t know what the classics would be. She wanted a starter list.

Here’s a fun way to test for the lacuna in your formal education. If you don’t know why the following answers to the perennial question “Why did the chicken cross the road?” are funny perhaps it’s time to start reading the good stuff.

Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.

Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.

Timothy Leary: Because that’s the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

Dick Cheney: National security was at stake.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends on your frame of reference.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Ernest Hemingway: To die….in the rain.

Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately…..and suck all the marrow of life.

Joseph Stalin or John Dewey: I don’t care…catch it…I need its eggs to make an omelet.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained.

Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.