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

by Alan Jacobs

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.

When we look to the past, Weil believes, what we are always looking for is whatever “is better than we are.” 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.” This brings to mind the old line about the great limitation of travel: Wherever you go, there you are. The future cannot teach us because we are the ones who must imagine it.

“Becoming aware that even the likes of Kant and Hume were products of their times is a humbling reminder that the greatest minds can still be blind to mistakes and evils, if they are widespread enough.”

As John Dewey wrote a century ago, “It seems almost incredible to us, for example, that things which we know very well, could have escaped recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other things.”

If it is foolish to think that we can carry with us all the good things from the past—from our personal past or that of our culture—while leaving behind all the unwanted baggage, it is a counsel of despair and, I think, another kind of foolishness to think that if we leave behind the errors and miseries of the past, we must also leave behind everything that gave that world its savor. Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.

It is easy for even the most genuine passion for justice to assume a punitive aspect: we don’t like to see people getting away with bad behavior. We want them to get what they deserve, and not to get what they don’t deserve. This attitude is more than understandable, but it can be hard to see whether it’s compatible with generosity.

I note that a new edition of Seneca’s treatise has recently been published by Princeton University Press under the title How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management. Indeed, Princeton has a whole series called “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers.”

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.

The theater critic Terry Teachout talks about plays that flatter their audience, that reassure them that the beliefs they came into the playhouse with are the ones with which they should leave: he calls this the “theater of concurrence.”

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.

Surely this is just the theme with which we began: the way an environment of high informational density produces people of low personal density. A world that seems to give us infinite choice actually makes choice nearly impossible: the informational context chooses for us. And what that means—Rousseau brings us something new here, something essential—is that our web of information determines what we love. Thus Saint-Preux: from day to day, “I cannot be sure what I will love.” To practice positive selection (chapter 3) in relation to the past, to seek the authentic kernel (chapter 5) of human connection, human value—such admirable ideas! Such noble ambitions are contained within them! But ideas and ambitions aren’t worth much unless they are transformed into a settled disposition, a habit of mind. And what I’m talking about, and indeed have been talking about throughout this book, is the need for a disposition to love: to love the too-often-neglected voices from our past, from the world’s past. In chapter 2 I said that “what the dead we encounter in books demand is only the blood of our attention,” but we will give even that metaphorical blood only in the cause of love—love of something, if only of power. 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 promis...