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

by Alan Jacobs

one of the best things about teaching is the way it presses you to revisit decisions you made in decades past, to defend and explain actions that for you long ago ceased to need defense or explanation.

write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life.

Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind. Like the poet Yeats, I often find that thought, and indeed life as a whole, is like a winding stair: you keep revisiting the same points, the same themes, but at higher levels of experience.

Certain images and events and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

A tranquil mind. Who doesn’t need that?

That twitchiness—that constant low-level anxiety at being communicatively unstimulated—seems so normal now that we may be slightly disconcerted when it’s absent. That’s why a tweet by Jason Gay, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, went viral a few years ago: “There’s a guy in this coffee shop sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking coffee, like a psychopath.” A man not justifying his existence through constant work or constant social connectivity? Psychopathy seems the only logical explanation. Unless, of course, he happens to possess a tranquil mind.

To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.

You realize that you need not obey the impulses of this moment—which, it is fair to say, never tend to produce a tranquil mind.

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

I am going to try to convince you that the deeper your understanding of the past, the greater personal density you will accumulate. I take that phrase from one of the most infuriatingly complex and inaccessible of twentieth-century novels, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

Hartmut Rosa points out that there is a close relationship between these common current experiences—of “social acceleration,” of time being somehow out of joint, of having access only to a “situational” conduct of life—and anxiety and depression. The feeling of being at a “frenetic standstill” is highly characteristic of the depressed person. I do not wish to suggest that reading old books is a cure for depression; but the development of personal density, to which reading old books can be a vital contribution, just might be a hedge against depressive inclinations, might provide—we will see this more than once in the pages that follow—a port, for however brief a time, in the storm.

You need the personal density that will hold you firmly until, in your considered and settled judgment, it is time to move. And to acquire the requisite density you have to get out of your transitory moment and into bigger time. Personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth.

Thus I invoke in this book’s title a line often uttered by the poet W. H. Auden: “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” Breaking bread is at the heart of this project: sitting at table with our ancestors and learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us.

Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is to make the other not identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor. I happen to think that this kind of training is useful in helping me learn to deal with my actual on-the-ground neighbors, though that claim is not central to my argument here, and in any case there’s nothing inevitable about this transfer: I know people who are exquisitely sensitive readers of texts who are also habitually rude to the people who serve them at restaurants. But surely to encounter texts from the past is a relatively nonthreatening, and yet potentially enormously rewarding, way to practice encountering difference.

But the buffer of the centuries enables her to see Aurangzeb as, simply, an old man who looked back over a long life with no satisfaction and much shame; and therefore to see him as someone worthy of her sympathy—someone in whose very shoes she could imagine herself. And this imaginative participation across the gap of years, of religion, of sex, settles her restless mind because it enables her to see her own situation with a clarity that’s all the more powerful because it was unlooked-for.

Nothing’s over, ever.” And this is both a blessing and a curse. The past that ties us to people in ways that hurt us also ties us to people in ways that make healing possible. Sometimes we wish that the past could be over; sometimes we are grateful that it is not. It stands in the middle, “partially completed” but not over, poised between radical otherness and utter likeness. And that is why, as Weil says, “Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past.” We can see what really matters—“the eternal,” what always matters—because of that middle distance.

“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.”

As John Dewey wrote a century ago, “It seems almost incredible to us, 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.”

My problem with the disregard of the past that we typically manifest today is that we are highly selective in what elements of a historical person’s character we are willing to take seriously. We tend to consider only those elements that reflect the dominant concerns of our moment, which are not the only concerns that are relevant to human judgment.

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.

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

Plutarch thought that one could live a wise and fulfilling life anywhere, and that was possible in part because of books—books that connect us to the Great.

“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” (that second emphasis mine). That is, a book becomes a classic for you in part because of its power to compel you to hear something that you not only hadn’t thought but might not believe, or might not want to believe. In this sense a book can become very much like a friend: When we enter into a conversation with a friend, do we want that person merely to nod approvingly at everything we say? Of course not: in many cases we want sympathy and agreement, to be sure, but a friend who offered only that would be no friend at all. When we speak our thought, we want more than agreement, we want addition: we want our friend to develop that thought, or to push back at it, if ever so gently. We want to get further along in our understanding of ourselves and our world than we were when we first spoke, and that cannot happen through mere affirmation. Perhaps the poet William Blake had something like this in mind when he wrote “Opposition is true friendship.” The work that is classic for me is the one that can give me, among other things, that kind of opposition.

“A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.”

Breaking bread with the dead is not a scholarly task to be completed but a permanent banquet, to which all who hunger are invited.

Indeed, to think that struggle and demand are incompatible with reverence is perhaps to misunderstand what reverence is—even what authority itself is.

the future we imagine is just that: not an alien anything, but what we imagine, what we can imagine. And often it’s what we can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.

Nora: How much do you even know about marriage? Emmy: Nothing. Nora: Exactly. Emmy: Because you left, I know nothing about what a marriage is and what it looks like. But I do know what the absence of it looks like, and what I want is the opposite of that.