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

by Alan Jacobs

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...