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

by Alan Jacobs

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.