Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

by Alan Jacobs

“We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.”

Chaucer: “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.”

The Aeneid and Jane Eyre are truly great works of literary art—that is what makes them worth responding to. Lesser works with the same flaws, the same blind spots, could simply be set aside. These books could not be so dismissed.

note that generosity is not simply assuming the best of some writer or text from the past. It is, rather, a kind of struggle: taking the past seriously enough to argue with it.

“Good nature, like a bee, collects honey from every herb.”

Now, having read the words, I knew that I had known this all along. But until now I had had no words to voice that knowledge.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.

In this model, whether employed by the right or the left or by some other political agenda that doesn’t fit on that scale, the books of the past may well be useful instruments but they cannot be our teachers. They cannot teach us in part because we are refusing to listen to what they have to say that doesn’t fit into our preexisting categories.

again. 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.

being at a loss, argumentatively, not because the person arguing with us is necessarily correct, but because that person has reflected on something we’ve never reflected on.

The favorable reception of A Doll’s House, Part 2 was as much a foregone conclusion as is its ending, which is a quintessential example of what I call the “theater of concurrence,” a genre whose practitioners take for granted that their liberal audiences already agree with them about everything. The success of such plays is contingent on the exactitude with which the author tells his audience what it wants to hear,

This could be written about the MCU.

Presumably Lucas Hnath wrote the play because it raises questions that are germane to our moment—but the questions germane to our moment are precisely the ones that are hardest for us to assess fairly, because of our emotional investment in them.

Charitable reading

That is where the theater of concurrence comes from: it encourages us in the feeling that we’ve reached the proper conclusions on the issues involved and therefore don’t need to revisit them—and a good feeling it is, because heaven knows there’s already enough for us to think about. Once more we perceive the power of triage.

complications of perception are essential to the value of reading the past—they are the chief means, I think, by which increasing our temporal bandwidth increases our personal density. Yes, there is a cost to this, and we have to fight our triage instincts to get to the point of experiencing, along with the people of the past, the choices that shaped their lives. We see their moral frames continually coming in and out of focus: at one moment we feel that we know them intimately and at the next scarcely at all.

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.

Alfred North Whitehead once gave very shrewd counsel to people studying the past: “Do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend.” That is, what people in the past were openly debating and conversing about is unlikely to be the most important thing about them. “There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.” And those unarticulated ideas are the truly key ones in any culture or age—including our own.

Disappointing to the activists, surely; and yet what if the activists’ minds had been furnished as Heaney’s was? What if they had known in their bones the human cost of pain that cannot be forgotten, pain so disorienting that it deprives the mind of a fair and just assessment of persons and events?

enough. John Stuart Mill famously wrote about those who would argue for some position in the public arena, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

is not language that the user will very likely be required to stand by or to act on, for it does not define any personal ground for standing or acting. Its only practical utility is to support with ‘expert opinion’ a vast, impersonal technological action already begun.”

For Berry, the vital distinction is between projecting and promising: “The ‘projecting’ of ‘futurologists’ uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one only to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else’s future.”

“You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.”*