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.

“trivial things”—the kinds of obsessions that “harass” us, that “torment”

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,

them is the sheer number of choices they have before them, which generates the fear that if they make the wrong choices

The past became a companion to him in what otherwise might have felt an exile, because, as L. P. Hartley famously says at the outset of his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

The Great Derangement, I felt that 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

It was from his ancestors, not from his contemporaries, that he learned how to think about the experience of living through environmental changes so massive that they dwarf human imagination.

The suspicion that there’s got to be some better way for people to live has the salutary effect of suppressing reflex.

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.

You realize that you need not obey the impulses of this moment—which, it is fair to say, never ten...

That neatly sums up a common current attitude: all history hitherto is at best a sewer of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general social injustice, at worst an abattoir which no reasonable person would even want to peek at.

There is an increasing sense not just that the past is sadly in error, is superannuated and irrelevant and full of foul ideas that we’re well rid of, but that it actually defiles us—its presence makes us unclean.

by information overload—a sense that we are always receiving more sheer data than we know how to evaluate—and a more general feeling of social acceleration—the perception that the world is not only changing but changing faster and faster. What those closely related experiences tend to require from us is a rough-and-ready kind of informational triage.

Hartmut Rosa calls “social acceleration.”

Consider, as an example, “Slow Tuesday Night,” a story by the American science fiction writer R. A. Lafferty. Lafferty imagines that some future researchers will discover the “Abebaios block,” a feature of our brains that slows down our decision making.*

And if the claim that Lafferty’s world prefigures ours strikes you as an exaggeration, I would ask you, dear reader, to remember the next-to-last thing that social media taught you to be outraged about. I bet you can remember only the last one. Every night on the internet is “Slow Tuesday Night.”

Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”—in

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

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.

“For a lot of families there’s no reason to trot out the old cultural chestnuts because the newest freshest thing is right at their fingertips.”

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.

There’s also this, from the preface that the seventeenth-century 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.” I cannot express too strongly how passionately I agree with this commendation of attending to the past.

I am going to try to convince you that the deeper your understanding of the past, the greater personal density you will accumulate.

Temporal bandwidth helps give us the requisite density: it addresses our condition of “frenetic standstill” by simultaneously slowing us down and giving us more freedom of movement. It is a balm for agitated souls.*

Because when the storm—the storm that carries what Rudyard Kipling called the “wind-borne Gods of the Market Place,”

You need the personal density that will hold you firmly until, in your considered and settled judgment, it is time to move. And to acquire the requisite density you have to get out of your transitory moment and into bigger time. Personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth.

I am aware that I have taken on a difficult task here: attention to the past is a hard sell. I want to argue that you can’t understand the place and time you’re in by immersion; the opposite’s true. You have to step out and away and back and forward, and you have to do it regularly. Then you come back to the here and now, and say: Ah. That’s how it is. But maybe 2 percent of the people I encounter are willing even to think about this possibility.

Tost comes pretty close to making the very argument I am making here: Exposing kids to “older and adult art” teaches them “to find value and pleasure in something that wasn’t necessarily made for them. I think that’s healthy as hell.”

As the philosopher Charles Taylor has suggested, one of the oddest elements of our presentism is that it is based on a historical thesis: “it is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition.”

This is not far from how many people feel about the whole of the past: that if we’re not careful we could be dragged back toward it.

The past as undead, as revenant.)

W. H. Auden: “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” Breaking bread is at the heart of this project: sitting at table with our ancestors and learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us.

Jesus of Nazareth controversial among his fellow Jews was his declaration that all foods are clean.

Perhaps not so much. We are certainly still concerned with the clean and the unclean. Consider this recent phenomenon: restaurant diners discovering that a politician or media personality from the Other Side is eating at a nearby table, and agitating to have the offender cast out.

We might also think of people who won’t sit at Thanksgiving or Christmas or Passover dinner with those whose politics are simply too alien, too repulsive: and note that it’s not being in the same room that defiles so much as sharing a meal.

If we cannot break bread with our contemporaries who violate our political commitments—whose views seem so alien and wrong that to share a meal with them feels like a kind of defilement—then it would seem that asking us to break bread with the dead is a futile act indeed. But perhaps not.

What the dead we encounter in books demand is only the blood of our attention, which we are free to withhold.

There is a kind of book about the past that proclaims the value of studying our ancestors, but does so by insisting that the really useful and interesting ones are remarkably like us.

So in The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt’s book about the recovery by Poggio Bracciolini, in the early modern period, of the writings of the ancient philosopher-poet Lucretius, we get heroes who are scarcely distinguishable from Stephen Greenblatt and who, conveniently, have all the same enemies.*

increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.

To take one vivid example, consider the cultural theorist Donna Haraway’s recent book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, an argument for, in politically vexed times, “staying with the trouble and for making generative oddkin.” (I know that there’s some fancy academic language here but please bear with me—please stay with the trouble.)

But here’s the complication: Who gets included in “each other”? Besides pigeons, I mean. Haraway says explicitly that her human kin are “antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people,” and people who share her commitment to “Make Kin Not Babies”: “Pronatalism in all its powerful guises ought to be in question almost everywhere.”

borrow a tripartite distinction from the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander—most people who use that kind of language are fine with their ingroup (“antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people”) and fine with the fargroup (pigeons), but the outgroup?

But no, thought Morton: “it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or

The author is not a guest at our table; we are a guest at hers.

But whether it’s possible to make such oddkin or not, we know what drives the pursuit: a profound desire to engage and reckon with otherness, without eliminating that otherness.

And this is also true of any legitimate interest in the past. Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is to make the other not identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor.

She also believed that that is hard to do when we’re dealing with our actual neighbor, because our emotions tend to be so near the surface. (This is why it’s easier for Donna Haraway and the pronatalists down her street to encounter pigeons than one another.)

with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!”

But the buffer of the centuries enables her to see Aurangzeb as, simply, an old man who looked back over a long life with no satisfaction and much shame;