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

by Alan Jacobs

In a well-known passage from Milan Kundera’s 1979 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one character says that “the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”

Thomas Hobbes wrote to his translation of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides: “For the principle and proper work of history [is] to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providentially towards the future.”

“Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” “Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.

The German sociologist Gerd-Günter Voss has outlined the development, over many centuries, of three forms of the “conduct of life.” The first is the traditional: in this model your life takes the form that the lives of people in your culture and class have always taken, at least for as long as anyone remembers. The key values in the traditional conduct of life are “security and regularity.” The second model is the strategic: people who follow this model have clear goals in mind (first, to get into an elite university; later, to become a radiologist or own their own company or retire at fifty) and form a detailed strategic plan to achieve those goals. But, Voss suggests, those two, while still present in various parts of the world, are increasingly being displaced by a third model for the conduct of life: the situational. The situational model has arisen in recent social orders that are unprecedentedly dynamic and fluid. People are less likely to plan to be radiologists when they hear that radiologists may be replaced by computers. They are less likely to plan to own a company when whatever business they’re inclined toward may not exist in a decade, or may undergo some kind of transformation we can’t currently anticipate. They are less likely to plan to have children when they don’t know what kind of world (in terms of climate as well as society and technology) they will be raising those children in. They might not even want to plan to have dinner with a friend a week from ...

Taylor writes this in the context of talking about what it’s like to live in a “disenchanted world,” a world governed not by spirits and demons but by the immutable laws of nature. On some level we know “that it was a struggle and an achievement to get to where we are; and that in some respects this achievement is fragile.” Moreover, We know this because each one of us as we grew up has had to take on the disciplines of disenchantment, and we regularly reproach each other for our failings in this regard, and accuse each other of “magical” thinking, of indulging in “myth,” of giving way to “fantasy”; we say that X isn’t living in our century, that Y has a “mediaeval” mind, while Z, whom we admire, is way ahead of her time. If Taylor is right, then we have an incentive to avoid looking at the past, or to look at it only with condescension. We believe in progress, we believe that history really does have an arc and that it bends toward justice. It’s a very comforting thing to believe, and we don’t want to look into the past only to discover that we have lost sight of vital truths and wise practices. Christopher Hitchens, in describing what he believes to be the baleful history of what he calls “religion,” celebrates the power to “escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection.”

At one point in the story Bim finds that she cannot sleep, and takes a book, at random, from her bookcase. It is the Life of Aurangzeb—the last great Mughal (and therefore Muslim) emperor of India. When the emperor knew he was dying, he dictated a letter to a close friend in which he wrote, “Now I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness, but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!”

When we look to the past, Weil believes, what we are always looking for is whatever “is better than we are.” Some of us tend to look toward the future for what is better, but Weil thinks that “what is better than we are cannot be found in the future.” The reason is simply that the future does not exist. “The future is empty and is filled by our imagination. Our imagination can only picture a perfection on our own scale. It is just as imperfect as we are; it does not surpass us by a single hair’s breadth.” This brings to mind the old line about the great limitation of travel: Wherever you go, there you are. The future cannot teach us because we are the ones who must imagine

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.

In many ways, this is the human predicament: We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas. Why should Washington and Jefferson and Milton have been any different? We should not be surprised that they failed to live up to their ideals; we should, I think, be surprised that in their time and place they upheld such ideals at all. They pushed the world a little closer to freedom and justice. Of how many of us can that be said?

As has often been said, if we wonder how it’s possible to, as Christians say, “hate the sin and love the sinner,” it’s easy: we do it to ourselves every day.

Something like this, it seems to me, is the fate of all social improvements, as much as we hate to admit it—and we do. Nothing is more intrinsic to human nature than the desire to believe that benefits can and do come without costs, that we can fix certain problems without introducing new ones. We certainly don’t want to admit that to those who would oppose productive change, lest we give them leverage to argue that the change shouldn’t have been made at all.* I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the most intense days of the civil rights movement, days of rage and heroism, and in a family that was badly wounded by alcoholism and violence. Through most of my childhood my father was in prison, and my mother worked long hours to keep us financially afloat; my world was narrow and limited and showed no signs of broadening. I am therefore enormously grateful for a social order that allowed me economic and professional mobility, that showed me open doors and encouraged me to go through them. But I would be lying to you and deceiving myself if I denied that that mobility came with costs. I have not had the intimacy with family that my parents and grandparents had; I have not known lifelong friendships. When I say this I do not wish my life to be different, but it is good for me to face what I have missed, if for no other reason than to help me find appropriate compensations and consolations.

What is true for me on a personal level is, I believe, true for all of us in one way or another, and true culturally. Our culture has made certain decisions on our behalf, decisions we individuals have participated in with varying degrees of willingness, and even when we fully endorse those decisions we should not, we must not, be afraid to count the costs—to notice the ways in which the rum we make lacks the savor of that made in the old, abandoned ways, even when we affirm that abandonment. For, again, only when we do so may we seek the proper compensations and consolations for what we have left behind. If it is foolish to think that we can carry with us all the good things from the past—from our personal past or that of our culture—while leaving behind all the unwanted baggage, it is a counsel of despair and, I think, another kind of foolishness to think that if we leave behind the errors and miseries of the past, we must also leave behind everything that gave that world its savor. Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.

When Niccolò Machiavelli was exiled from his native Florence and forced to live in the countryside among rubes and rednecks, he admitted that he was prone to get into pointless arguments with said rubes and rednecks, but at the end of the day he could do this: When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.

In a speech Churchill gave in 1909, when he was still known primarily as a journalist, he said: Someone—I forget who—has said: “Words are the only things which last forever.” That is, to my mind, always a wonderful thought. The most durable structures raised in stone by the strength of man, the mightiest monuments of his power, crumble into dust, while the words spoken with fleeting breath, the passing expression of the unstable fancies of his mind, endure not as echoes of the past, not as mere archaeological curiosities or venerable relics, but with a force and life as new and strong, and sometimes far stronger than when they were first spoken, and leaping across the gulf of three thousand years, they light the world for us to-day.

Daniel Mendelsohn, by contrast, didn’t immediately leap to a modern “application” of the Aeneid—like the person (we all know the type) whose response to everyone else’s pain is to be reminded of his own, which he then wants to narrate at length—but rather wrestled with the poem on its own terms for years before finally realizing that the experiences of our time actually bring to light something real and true about this great poem that would have been invisible to those among our ancestors who most warmly venerated it.

If my memory doesn’t deceive me, the first time a figure from the past spoke to me directly and gave me a sense of instant kinship across the centuries was when I discovered this line by Chaucer: “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.” Why that should have been so moving to me when I was so young and had as yet no “craft” at all, I cannot tell.

“What we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how,” wrote Wordsworth,

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

All of these experiences point toward the value of pursuing, seriously, a genuine engagement with the past. It is other than us in a broad range of ways, and we can’t control that otherness. It speaks to us in ways that we can’t understand, and then (suddenly, unexpectedly) in ways we understand perfectly. When a slave boy in Virginia reads and thrills to a speech an Irishman made in London, or when a child from the slums of Johannesburg finds his heart touched and warmed by rhymes about rural England, that is the Big Here and the Long Now. And that’s available to all of us who have the requisite openness and patience, who are willing to risk being a bit bored, a bit confused, maybe even a bit angry. Access is easy; no systematic plan is required; the risks are low. But the rewards are potentially immense.*

In a brilliant essay on the same branches of the online alt-right that Donna Zuckerberg covers, Brian Phillips quotes a compelling line by Emily Dickinson: “The unknown is the largest need of the intellect.” Phillips continues, “I happen to believe that this is true; but the kind of esotericism that thrives on the far right has never had the slightest interest in the unknown. It wants to be told the news it wants to hear.” But this is not a pitfall to which the right alone is subject. Any one of us who denies that we want our assumptions confirmed would be lying or self-deceived. The theater critic Terry Teachout talks about plays that flatter their audience, that reassure them that the beliefs they came into the playhouse with are the ones with which they should leave: he calls this the “theater of concurrence.” The concluding lines of Phillips’s essay make, I think, a fitting commentary on this chapter, because all of us, on some level, want the whole world to be for us a theater of concurrence: “The varieties of false knowledge in this world are infinite; one of the most dangerous is the knowledge that answers desire. Policies begin in dreams.”

this almost ostentatious fair-mindedness was integral to Douglass’s massive success as an orator, as a persuader of the half-convinced and the faint of heart. It is a model of reckoning with the past, to sift, to assess, to return and reflect again. The idealization and demonization of the past are equally easy, and immensely tempting in an age of social acceleration. What Douglass offers instead is a model of negotiating with the past in a way that gives charity and honesty equal weight. I do not tell you that this is an easy task; I do not even tell you that it is one with which you can be finished. If you think as Douglass thought, you will never reach a final verdict on those who came before you; you will at best agree to a continuation. And it is in agreeing to a continuation with the past, not in pronouncing a universal verdict either for or against, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, that we increase our personal density.

The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once gave very shrewd counsel to people studying the past: “Do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend.” That is, what people in the past were openly debating and conversing about is unlikely to be the most important thing about them. “There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.” And those unarticulated ideas are the truly key ones in any culture or age—including our own.

When we perceive some sudden dissonance between ourselves and those people, we should not run from that dissonance but straight toward it.

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.”

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.

Surely this is just the theme with which we began: the way an environment of high informational density produces people of low personal density.

And what I’m talking about, and indeed have been talking about throughout this book, is the need for a disposition to love: to love the too-often-neglected voices from our past, from the world’s past.