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

by Alan Jacobs

Horace exhorts himself, and us, to “interrogate the writings of the wise”—the sorts of thinkers, perhaps, that he studied when he was at the Academy in Athens—because they are wise, of course, but for another reason as well: they are alien to us, they are not part of our habitual round.

One of the consequences of an individualist society such as ours, a society in which each of us is expected to forge her own identity according to her own lights, is that we feel what the sociologist Norbert Elias called “pressure for foresight,” the compulsion (perhaps a better translation of Elias’s German) to look ahead into a future for which we must plan, but which—the future being the future—we cannot see. That is why 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 exhorts Lollius, exhorts himself, exhorts us, to shift our attention from those compulsions toward questions that really and always matter—“Where is it virtue comes from?”—because even by just exploring those questions, even if we fail to answer them, we’re pushing back against the tyranny of everyday anxieties. We’re resisting, or evading, the stresses that a condition of always-on connectivity inevitably brings to us,

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

to look to late-twentieth-century literature for any form of response to what we are facing today is useless. It offers no resources. It’s so much centered on the individual, so much centered on identity, it really doesn’t give us any way of thinking about these issues.”

Ghosh concluded that reading works from the past “really teaches you that what has happened, what modernity has done is, literally, made this work of recognition impossible.” That is, modern consciousness has taken certain forms that don’t just ignore the experiences that he wants to write about but disable us from understanding them.

we also learn to be ruthless in deciding how to deploy our attention. We only have so much of it, and often the decision of whether or not to “pay” it must be made in an instant. To avoid madness we must learn to reject appeals to our time, and reject them without hesitation or pity.

You can’t stop playing the game, but its rules keep changing without warning. It’s worth noting that Francis Fukuyama wrote his notorious book about “the end of history”—arguing that we had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”—in 1992, just as the internet age was kicking into high gear: everything is moving so fast . . . but history has ended. In this way, Rosa contends, we find ourselves in a state of “frenetic standstill,” constantly in motion but going nowhere.

information overload and social acceleration work together to create a paralyzing feedback loop, pressing us to practice continually the triage I spoke of earlier, forcing our judgments about what to pay attention to, what to think about, to become ever more peremptory and irreversible. (That’s one of the reasons why social media’s attitude toward sinners—the unclean, the defiling—is simply to expel them from the community, so they don’t need to be thought about any further.) And all this has the further effect of locking us into the present moment. There’s no time to think about anything else than the Now, and the not-Now increasingly takes on the character of an unwelcome and, in its otherness, even befouling imposition.