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

by Alan Jacobs

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.

“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.”

I am going to try to convince you that the deeper your understanding of the past, the greater personal density you will accumulate.

The feeling of being at a “frenetic standstill” is highly characteristic of the depressed person.

our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition.”

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?

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

To say “This text offends me, I will read no further” may be shortsighted; but to read a “great book” from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better.

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

But note that generosity is not simply assuming the best of some writer or text from the past. It is, rather, a kind of struggle: taking the past seriously enough to argue with it.

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.

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.