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

by Alan Jacobs

“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.