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

by Alan Jacobs

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

On the one hand, we feel that “everything is moving so fast”—as one philosopher puts it, “Speed is the god of our era”—but often we also simultaneously feel trapped in our social structure and life pattern, imprisoned, deprived of meaningful choice.

Second, much self-help operates according to a listicle model of help: These Ten Tricks Will Change Your Life! Which might work if you didn’t have enormously powerful social and technological forces pushing you in directions you don’t get to choose. And if you weren’t so light, so lacking in density, that you can’t retain your place when the winds start blowing, even if you want to.

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty”—and surely we’d all love to help children become antifragile in this way. A powerful instrument in generating that antifragility is a serious encounter with the past—but that’s what YouTube recommendations and an online world of “You May Also Like” make very difficult to see.

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.

We do not have the same intensity of involvement in the past that we do in the present, and it’s precisely that which makes the past useful to us: “Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past.”

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.”

Just as our word-processing program gives us a default font that we might not have the energy to change, and a digital thermostat offers preset temperatures that we might not be sure how to change, our social media feeds assume that we will be interested in . . . what everyone else is interested in, which will surely be something that happened today.

Our culture has made certain decisions on our behalf, decisions we individuals have participated in with varying degrees of willingness, and even when we fully endorse those decisions we should not, we must not, be afraid to count the costs—to notice the ways in which the rum we make lacks the savor of that made in the old, abandoned ways, even when we affirm that abandonment.

Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.

And that’s available to all of us who have the requisite openness and patience, who are willing to risk being a bit bored, a bit confused, maybe even a bit angry. Access is easy; no systematic plan is required; the risks are low. But the rewards are potentially immense.*

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.

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.

We could equally well say that those who know only their own moment in history know little of that—and that they, and their whole culture, are worse for their ignorance. We live thinly in our instant, and don’t know what we don’t know.