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

by Alan Jacobs

In a well-known passage from Milan Kundera’s 1979 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one character says that “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.