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

by Alan Jacobs

“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.”

“Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” “Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago. . . .

The feeling of being at a “frenetic standstill” is highly characteristic of the depressed person.

“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.”

we know “that it was a struggle and an achievement to get to where we are; and that in some respects this achievement is fragile.” Moreover,

“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”

What the dead we encounter in books demand is only the blood of our attention, which we are free to withhold. My plea is that we do not withhold it, that we use our power to give them utterance.

Maya Angelou: I note the obvious differences Between each sort and type, But we are more alike, my friends, Than we are unalike.

keep giving the blood of our attention.

Donna Haraway’s recent book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene,

If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.” 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 she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.” The author is not a guest at our table; we are a guest at hers.

There are many wonderful things about books, but among the most wonderful is that you can close them when you need to, when they become a little too strange, too disturbing. It’s like being able to quit someone’s table instantaneously but without causing trouble or offense. And the fact that you can escape so easily might actually be a good reason not to.

absolute calm Bim realizes that she too carries a stupendous caravan of sin, one that she greatly desires to empty, as best she can.

Baggini’s chief argument is that none of these figures had the good fortune to be confronted with eloquent proponents of opposing views. They did not have the benefit that we have of being able to read Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. “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.”

Here’s an example: there will be a time, I am certain, when our descendants will be positively aghast that we ever ate animals. How could we possibly have been so thoughtlessly cruel? What could we say for ourselves, should someone from the future travel back in time and shake an admonitory finger at us? If she came to our moment, the vegetarians and vegans among us would crow in triumph as the rest of us muttered excuses. And what we’d probably say was that we never really thought it through, that we were raised eating meat, it was what we had always done, the restaurants were full of meat dishes, trying to go vegetarian seemed sort of daunting, we always had other things to think about that took higher priority—that last point above all. And we would say those things to the visitor of the future because those are the things we have been saying to ourselves for a very long time.

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.”

As people who work with prisoners often say, no one should be defined by the worst thing that they ever did. We need to look at the whole person, and if we do our task becomes more complex, but also more rewarding.

“the paradox of civilization”: its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.

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.

Thanks to Plutarch it not only seemed natural to George Washington to perceive himself as a modern analogue of Cincinnatus—the great general who saved the Roman Republic and then retired to his farm—but it was equally natural to everyone else who knew Washington or merely observed him to assess him in comparison to the character of Cincinnatus.

And by accepting the association Washington bound himself to certain standards, invited others to judge him by them, and made the same judgments upon himself.

Someone—I forget who—has said: “Words are the only things which last forever.” That is, to my mind, always a wonderful thought. The most durable structures raised in stone by the strength of man, the mightiest monuments of his power, crumble into dust, while the words spoken with fleeting breath, the passing expression of the unstable fancies of his mind, endure not as echoes of the past, not as mere archaeological curiosities or venerable relics, but with a force and life as new and strong, and sometimes far stronger than when they were first spoken, and leaping across the gulf of three thousand years, they light the world for us to-day.

“Any man who is cut off from the past, and content with the future, is a man most unjustly disinherited; and all the more unjustly if he is happy in his lot, and is not permitted even to know what he has lost.”

“In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives a lot of pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity.”

Both documents “gave tongue to interesting thoughts of [his] own soul,” which earlier had “died away for want of utterance.”

Only Epictetus understood. He understood! Only he understood why Conrad Hensley had refused to accept a plea bargain! Only Epictetus understood why he had refused to lower himself just a rung or two, demean himself just a little bit, dishonor himself just a touch, confess to a minor crime, a mere misdemeanor, in order to avoid the risk of a jail sentence.

earlier in our story, Frederick Douglass. His reflection on the American Founders—in a speech called “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” delivered in Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1852—is as excellent an example of reckoning healthily with the past as anything I have ever read. He begins by acknowledging that “they were great men,” though he immediately goes on to say, “The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.” Yes: Douglass is compelled to view them in a critical light, because their failure to eradicate slavery at the nation’s founding led to his own enslavement, led to his being beaten and abused and denied every human right, forced him to live in bondage and in fear until he could at long last make his escape. Nevertheless, “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

“This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” For every time he hears the Founders praised, he hears something else too: Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. . . . To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery.

I do not tell you that this is an easy task; I do not even tell you that it is one with which you can be finished. If you think as Douglass thought, you will never reach a final verdict on those who came before you; you will at best agree to a continuation. And it is in agreeing to a continuation with the past, not in pronouncing a universal verdict either for or against, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, that we increase our personal density.

Near the beginning of this book I talked about the ways that information overload generates the need for informational triage. That environment also creates the need for moral triage: for straightforward binary decisions about whether we admire or despise a given person. Admiring is easier when a person embodies values that stand high on our list of priorities—especially if we think that those priorities are being threatened.

This is wonderfully true and powerful; but there’s something also to be said for that moment when a figure from the past who has perfectly anticipated something you already believe then turns around and says something that puzzles or alienates you. That is, I firmly believe, the greater moment of enlightenment: 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.

When we encounter real people from the past, like Dorothy Osborne, and fictional ones, like Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House or Jo March in Little Women, our instinctive responses tell a tale about our values, our commitments, our assumptions, our hopes, our fears—and about theirs. When we perceive some sudden dissonance between ourselves and those people, we should not run from that dissonance but straight toward it. This testing of our responses against those of our ancestors is an exciting endeavor—a potentially endless table conversation, though, again, one we can suspend at any time. (The sad thing is that only we can benefit from it, not the ones whose world we visit.) As Leslie Jamison says, that tension crackles and sparks. And the sparks produce both light and warmth.

But the problem is not only, and not even primarily, one of rushed perception: the “social acceleration” he’s experiencing changes him morally. He feels that he is “forced to change the order of [his] moral affections, forced to attribute a value to fantasies, and impose silence on nature and reason.” The result, he says, is: “I drift from whim to whim, and my tastes being constantly enslaved to opinion, I cannot a single day be sure what I will love the next.”

Surely this is just the theme with which we began: the way an environment of high informational density produces people of low personal density.

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.”

Farewell, little book: go forth into the world and, if you can, do some good. I at least will always be in your debt. You gave me many sweet months when, as people told me breathlessly of the latest astonishing video or the latest appalling tweet, I could say, I’m sorry, I know nothing about all that, for I have been thinking of old books, and to that work I must return.