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Like the poet Yeats, I often find that thought, and indeed life as a whole, is like a winding stair: you keep revisiting the same points, the same themes, but at higher levels of experience. From those ascending vantage points a given idea, a given feeling, a given perception, is recognizably itself and yet somehow different.
“Interrogate the writings of the wise,” he counsels.
Where is it virtue comes from, is it from books? Or is it a gift from Nature that can’t be learned? What is the way to become a friend to yourself? What brings tranquility? What makes you care less?
some therapists who work with young people today say that the single greatest source of stress and anxiety for them is the sheer number of choices they have before them, which generates the fear that if they make the wrong choices they may not be able to overcome their own errors.
Horace reached out from long ago and far away to tell us that we should ourselves reach out to the long ago and far away. He was not like us; and yet he spoke to us health-giving words.
To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing. Watching the latest social-media war break out, I often recall Grace Kelly’s character in High Noon, a Quaker pacifist, saying, “I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There’s got to be some better way for people to live.”
To open yourself to the past is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of descending in tweeted wrath on a young woman whose clothing you disapprove of, or firing an employee because of a tweet you didn’t take time to understand, or responding to climate change either by ignoring it or by indulging in impotent rage.
So it’s no wonder younger folks don’t have any cultural memory or taste for aesthetic adventure. In pre-school their parents played the most recent kids’ music in the car for them instead of the older music the parents actually wanted to listen to. And at home the kids only watched kid-centric YouTube channels or superhero or Pixar movies instead of suffering through dad’s weird favorite old movies. So when the kids hit elementary school, they only have ears and eyes for whatever was being marketed to their age group that year. The same thing carried forth to junior high, high school, and
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“the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.” This is true, powerfully true, vitally true.
philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote to his translation of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides: “For the principle and proper work of history [is] to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providentially towards the future.”
“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago. . . .
Tony Tost, in the interview I quoted earlier, is especially concerned with the effects of presentism on children, and thinks that we ought to make them watch stuff not made for them, not marketed to them, not fired like an arrow at their amygdalae: “Older and adult art forces them to get out of their comfort zone and deal with a little ambiguity and thematic density and encounter shit that wasn’t manufactured for their immediate effortless consumption.”
“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
The real challenge, but also the real opportunity, of breaking bread with the dead comes when the dead say something that freaks us out—freaks us out to the point that we are strongly tempted to turn away in disgust and horror. But those may be just the moments when we need to steel ourselves to keep giving the blood of our attention.
Some of us tend to look toward the future for what is better, but Weil thinks that “what is better than we are cannot be found in the future.” The reason is simply that the future does not exist. “The future is empty and is filled by our imagination. Our imagination can only picture a perfection on our own scale. It is just as imperfect as we are; it does not surpass us by a single hair’s breadth.”
“If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable—gauche, uncivilised—to act in disregard of our descendants.”
Isn’t this strange mixture of vices and virtues, foolishness and wisdom, blindness and insight, simply the human condition? (And, if we’re going to be honest about it, my condition, and yours?)
By reading and considering the past, we cut through the thick, strong vines that bind our attention to the things of the moment. Our attention thereby becomes more free.
There’s no doubt that Washington and Jefferson should have realized that the practice of slavery was completely incompatible with the ideals they put forth in the Declaration of Independence and then, later, in the Constitution. But if they had not articulated those ideals so powerfully, it is likely that slavery would have been less frequently challenged, less often scorned—socially stronger. It must be remembered that the core ideas themselves—that all human beings are created equal, that social differentiation and social hierarchy are not written into the fabric of the universe—were
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As the English historian C. V. Wedgwood wrote in the introduction to her great history of the English Civil War, “The highest ideals put forth in this generation of conflict were noble; the men who fought or worked for them were less noble than the ideals, for the best of men do not consistently live on the highest plane of virtue, and most men live far below it.”
We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas. Why should Washington and Jefferson and Milton have been any different? We should not be surprised that they failed to live up to their ideals; we should, I think, be surprised that in their time and place they upheld such ideals at all. They pushed the world a little closer to freedom and justice. Of how many of us can that be said?
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.
In a wonderfully illuminating book, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, Garry Wills tells the story of a conversation that took place during the Revolutionary War between England’s King George III and his court painter, the Pennsylvania-born Benjamin West. The king asked West what he thought General Washington would do if he happened to defeat the British, and West replied that he would simply return to his plantation at Mount Vernon. George replied that if Washington did that he would be the greatest man who ever lived.
“Any man who is cut off from the past, and content with the future, is a man most unjustly disinherited; and all the more unjustly if he is happy in his lot, and is not permitted even to know what he has lost.”
Surely we have lost something vital when we have lost the power to be startled, even offended, by the voices from the past.
even granted the differences in belief and habit that separate us from the Romans, we can and do read their poems and find that “we catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught.”
Breaking bread with the dead is not a scholarly task to be completed but a permanent banquet, to which all who hunger are invited.
Indeed, to think that struggle and demand are incompatible with reverence is perhaps to misunderstand what reverence is—even what authority itself is.
When a slave boy in Virginia reads and thrills to a speech an Irishman made in London, or when a child from the slums of Johannesburg finds his heart touched and warmed by rhymes about rural England, that is the Big Here and the Long Now. And that’s available to all of us who have the requisite openness and patience, who are willing to risk being a bit bored, a bit confused, maybe even a bit angry. Access is easy; no systematic plan is required; the risks are low. But the rewards are potentially immense.
She thinks it’s a valuable exercise to project ourselves imaginatively into the mental and emotional world of people from the past: not to think of what we would do if we were in that situation, but of how that experience felt, immediately, to them, to people shaped and formed as they were.
“a small forest of useful concepts that used to grow between ‘racism’ and ‘woke-ness’—blindness, stereotyping, prejudice, bigotry—has been cleared. Consequently, we are losing the ability to understand how people in the past thought about their attitudes and actions, and therefore are losing the ability to make proportionate moral judgments.”
“The unknown is the largest need of the intellect.”
we should return to a figure from earlier in our story, Frederick Douglass. His reflection on the American Founders—in a speech called “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” delivered in Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1852—is as excellent an example of reckoning healthily with the past as anything I have ever read. He begins by acknowledging that “they were great men,” though he immediately goes on to say, “The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.” Yes: Douglass is
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The idealization and demonization of the past are equally easy, and immensely tempting in an age of social acceleration. What Douglass offers instead is a model of negotiating with the past in a way that gives charity and honesty equal weight.
there’s something also to be said for that moment when a figure from the past who has perfectly anticipated something you already believe then turns around and says something that puzzles or alienates you. That is, I firmly believe, the greater moment of enlightenment: the moment of double realization.
To confront the reality that the very same people who give us rich wisdom can also talk what seems to us absolute nonsense (and vice versa) is an education in the human condition. Including our own condition, which is likewise compounded of wisdom and nonsense.
those who know only their own moment in history know little of that—and that they, and their whole culture, are worse for their ignorance. We live thinly in our instant, and don’t know what we don’t know.
By taking responsibility for our words—which only those who are anchored, who are minimally vulnerable to “the wind-blown Gods of the Market Place,” can do—we step away from the “merely provisional” uses of language and toward genuine accountability.
I am quoting the wizard Gandalf there, who says to his colleagues, “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
But what I counsel is to give the dead the blood of our attention for our own sake, to enrich and strengthen our identities, to make ourselves more solid and less tenuous—and then, I suggest in chapter 9, to use the solidity we have gained to help us make meaningful promises to the future.
These are the writers who help us to encounter our ancestors not as anthropological curiosities whom we observe from a critical distance, but as those with whom we can, and should, break bread.
Farewell, little book: go forth into the world and, if you can, do some good. I at least will always be in your debt. You gave me many sweet months when, as people told me breathlessly of the latest astonishing video or the latest appalling tweet, I could say, I’m sorry, I know nothing about all that, for I have been thinking of old books, and to that work I must return.
