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

by Alan Jacobs

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.