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

by Alan Jacobs

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.”

The French thinker Simone Weil believed this strongly. Weil—who was a very strange kind of religious mystic—believed that in all of our human encounters we should be seeking to discern what is eternally true. She also believed that that is hard to do when we’re dealing with our actual neighbor, because our emotions tend to be so near the surface.

“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.”

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.

Early in this book I quoted a famous line from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Perhaps even more frequently quoted is a sentence by William Faulkner that expresses what looks like the opposite view: “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” Both statements are true. The decisions of our ancestors, however strange those people may be to us, touch us and our world; and our decisions will touch the lives of those who come after us. By understanding what moved them and what they hoped for, we give ourselves a better chance of acting wisely—in some cases, as those ancestors did; in others, as they didn’t. We judge them, as we should, as we must; but if we judge them fairly and proportionately, as we ourselves hope someday to be judged, then we may use them well with an eye toward the future. Simone Weil, as we saw, recommends studying the past because the past may sometimes be more than we are, while the future, being imagined by us, is confined by our limitations. But I do not wholly agree: if our imaginings of the future are grounded in a deep and sympathetic knowledge of the past, then we may have the personal density required to imagine a future that lies beyond the confines of our experience.

By increasing our personal density we also increase our power to make genuine promises—and, as the writer Francis Spufford has said, “You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.”* In making those promises, we take a step toward giving those who come after us clean earth to till. I am quoting the wizard Gandalf there, who says to his colleagues, “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.” But I am not sure about that second sentence. The weather of the future—and I speak both metaphorically and literally—may also largely depend on the promises we make, and our fidelity in keeping them.

Surely this is just the theme with which we began: the way an environment of high informational density produces people of low personal density. A world that seems to give us infinite choice actually makes choice nearly impossible: the informational context chooses for us. And what that means—Rousseau brings us something new here, something essential—is that our web of information determines what we love.