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

by Alan Jacobs

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, but which—the future being the future—we cannot see. That is why some therapists who work with young people today say that the single greatest source of stress and anxiety for them is the sheer number of choices they have before them,

we’re pushing back against the tyranny of everyday anxieties. We’re resisting, or evading, the stresses that a condition of always-on connectivity inevitably brings to us,

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.”

Watching the latest social-media war break out, I often recall Grace Kelly’s character in High Noon, a Quaker pacifist, saying, “I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There’s got to be some better way for people to live.”

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.

To avoid madness we must learn to reject appeals to our time, and reject them without hesitation or pity.

the deeper your understanding of the past, the greater personal density you will accumulate.

Many times over the years I have read, or heard, people encouraging readers of old books to set aside their modern assumptions in order to enter into the world of the old text. I think this is bad advice.

Nobody thinks about everything; nobody can think about everything; our cognitive limitations are such that there will always be a great many topics that we will take no real thought over, but will simply believe what the people around us, for the most part, believe. These views can scarcely be dignified by the term “belief”: they’re more like the intellectual equivalent of ambient noise, always there in the background but never noticed, never brought to consciousness for reflection.

We may not know that we can change the default settings of the media machine; we may know but lack the time and energy to do so. And so those settings continue to reinforce the presentism that they’re claiming merely to reflect. By reading and considering the past, we cut through the thick, strong vines that bind our attention to the things of the moment. Our attention thereby becomes more free.

We are overwhelmed by data, we are continually at the mercy of a fire hose of information, and anything we can do to limit the amount of data that we have to deal with, we do.

no doubt that Washington and Jefferson should have realized that the practice of slavery was completely incompatible with the ideals they put forth in the Declaration of Independence and then, later, in the Constitution. But if they had not articulated those ideals so powerfully, it is likely that slavery would have been less frequently challenged, less often scorned—socially stronger.

lack the personal density we need to discern that the political disputes of our own moment likewise tend to concern, not good versus evil, but competing goods.

What Milton and the American Founders have in common is this: they were early and vigorous proponents of the very ideas that would later be used to denounce them. They opened a door that they chose not to walk through—but they opened it. As the English historian C. V. Wedgwood wrote in the introduction to her great history of the English Civil War, “The highest ideals put forth in this generation of conflict were noble; the men who fought or worked for them were less noble than the ideals, for the best of men do not consistently live on the highest plane of virtue, and most men live far below it.”

In many ways, this is the human predicament: We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas.

We should not be surprised that they failed to live up to their ideals; we should, I think, be surprised that in their time and place they upheld such ideals at all. They pushed the world a little closer to freedom and justice. Of how many of us can that be said?

The Plutarchian frame of mind was essential to the thinking of Winston Churchill, for instance, who as a writer as well as a statesman perceived the past with an immediacy that seems strange to most of us today.

the person (we all know the type) whose response to everyone else’s pain is to be reminded of his own,

You don’t silence the part of you that sees the problems with the book, its errors, its moral malformations; neither do you silence the part of you that responds so warmly to that “utopian moment.”

But here’s one of the most important traits of authors of old books: they’re dead. You can neither punish them nor reward them.

Generosity can be viral.

generosity is not simply assuming the best of some writer or text from the past. It is, rather, a kind of struggle: taking the past seriously enough to argue with it. Recall Calvino: “Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.” I think also of Jacob, in the book of Genesis, who, by the side of a stream called Jabbok, all through the night, wrestles with “a man.” They grapple for hours, and then, as the sun rises, the man has had enough, but Jacob says to him, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” Jacob later says that it was God he wrestled with, but that is a rather demanding attitude to take toward a deity, is it not? But note what Jacob demands. Indeed, to think that struggle and demand are incompatible with reverence is perhaps to misunderstand what reverence is—even what authority itself is.

If human nature never changes, human circumstances do, so even if the copybook headings are both inerrant and complete, we must learn to apply them to our current challenges. And that requires something other and more than obedient copying. In brief, it requires us to be like Jacob, who wrestled with a mighty figure by the Jabbok not in order to defeat or destroy him, but with a strange generosity, an eager and earnest belief that his opponent had something of great value in his possession, and that he could give it to Jacob. I will not let you go until you bless me.

But the experiences of Abrahams and Douglass also show us that that power arises in some cases from likeness—from the sense that that could be me speaking—and from difference—that is someone very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both.

Sad to say, people in the English-speaking countries, especially in the U.S.A., tend not to be very interested in other languages or the literatures written in them. But we are interested in First Contact—the initial human encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. We make many, many science fiction books and movies on that theme.

It seems that human beings have a proclivity for encountering otherness on their own terms—in controlled and nonthreatening ways.

it really is far too easy for us to map old books and their authors onto our familiar, comfortable categories—“inspirational texts,” “meditation, mindfulness, and other spiritual exercises”—a mapping that renders us unable to hear a strange word, a different word, a word that takes us beyond what we already know.

“when approaching the past we often apply concepts and categories—religion, race, the individual—that were not available to those living then, and so we fail to understand them as they understood themselves.”

we are losing the ability to understand how people in the past thought about their attitudes and actions, and therefore are losing the ability to make proportionate moral judgments.”

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.”

John Stuart Mill famously wrote about those who would argue for some position in the public arena, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” 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.

What laws and what norms will embody our care for those who come after us, including those already here and those yet to be born? But this is a question that we cannot ask if our thoughts are imprisoned by the stimulation of what rolls across our social media feeds.

our web of information determines what we love.

There’s an important sense in which we cannot use the past to love ourselves unless we also learn to love our ancestors. We must see them not as others but as neighbors—and then, ultimately, as kin, as members of our (very) extended family.