by Benjamin D. Utter
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Readerâs Guide to a More Tranquil Mind
by Alan Jacobs
Penguin Press. 2020; 192 pp., $16.00
. .
Can books make us good? Many of my university students seem to think so, or at least to assume that I think so. When I ask them just what the heck âliteratureâ actually is and why anyone ought to bother with it, many of them dutifully genuflect with all the reverence due something wholly unknowable and recite with unconvincing earnestness the various reasons why books are âgood for youâ â as if describing the benefits of kale.
C.S. Lewis, for one, didnât think reading was a prerequisite for virtue. In An Experiment in Criticism, he allows that the non-literary person âmay be full of goodness and good sense,â perhaps more of it than many of the literary, and in his essay on âLearning in Wartimeâ he forcefully rejects âany idea that lingers in the mind of some modern people that cultural activities are in their own right spiritual and meritoriousâas if scholars and poets were intrinsically more pleasing to God than scavengers and bootblacks.â
And yet the idea lingers still. It is obvious from Alan Jacobsâs latest book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Readerâs Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, that he has encountered similar assumptions in his students. Though he makes plain in the preface that âI write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers,â the classroom is nevertheless on his mind: âMuch of what I have to say here is what I have tried to convey to my students, though rarely in terms as explicit as I lay out here. Maybe some of my former students will read this book and think, Oh, thatâs what he was up to.â
One of the things heâs up to here in this apologia for reading long-expired writers is to follow C.S. Lewis (about whom Jacobs has written an excellent biography) in swatting away the idea that books should be ladled down young throats as a kind of moral medicine. Instead, Jacobs suggests, the reader should come to books as to a feast laid out before our minds, emotions, and senses. And as the title of the book suggests, itâs not a lonely meal. Taking as his banner the poet W.H. Audenâs remark that âArt is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead,â Jacobs explains that âBreaking bread is at the heart of this project: sitting at table with our ancestors and learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us.â
That reading is not a moral duty but rather a pleasure with potential moral benefits is a point Jacobs has made at greater length in previous books. Readers of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011) and How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (2017) will recognize in this work the continuation and confluence of a number of his favorite themes: the delights to be found in books, evenâor perhaps especiallyâin old ones; how that delight can be dulled by the tyranny of presentism; and how to cultivate creativity, charity, and intellectual humility during a time when worship of what Kipling called âthe wind-borne Gods of the Market Placeâ has become the global religion.
If âbreaking bread with the deadâ does not necessarily make us good, it may at least help to quiet our unquiet minds and in so doing help us stand more firmly against forces that profit from coaxing us to lead lives of chronic outrage and shallow triviality. Thatâs certainly the aim of this book. Jacobs observes, âWe live thinly in our instant, and donât know what we donât know.â Some might think this an unlikely dilemma for citizens of the information age, but one of Jacobsâs key arguments here is that itâs a grave error to assume that access to data amounts to intelligence, to say nothing of wisdom: âan environment of high informational density produces people of low personal density.â Borrowing a passage from Pynchonâs Gravityâs Rainbow, Jacobs makes the point that âpersonal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth,â which is âthe 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.â Thus, attending to the past by breaking bread with the dead may serve to stouten the thin soul as well as help settle the Twitter-addled, or as he puts it, âtwitchy,â mind.
But why all this literary necrophilia? Why not seek nourishment among the living? For one thing, we arenât always very good at trying. Jacobsâs own students (much like mine, Iâm afraid) attest as much, for when he enters the classroom, âfairly regularly the first thing I see is every head bowed before a glowing screen.â Well, itâs hard to blame them. As most of us probably donât need a book to tell us, engaging with other people can be exceedingly difficult, our differences, real and perceived, too readily dividing us. The dead, by contrast, can be more companionable, coming as they do from so great a distance that, as Simone Weil puts it, they â[offer] no food for our passions.â Even so, they too may shock us with their differenceâand shock us they should, Jacobs argues! âRelatabilityâ is not entirely off the menu, but difference is the main course, for to sit at this table is to accept an invitation to relate to the dead not in spite of but precisely because of their âunrelatability.â As Jacobs explains, âReading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is to make the other not identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor.â
And such neighbors! In nine short but rich chapters, we encounter brief but close readings of works from writers ranging from Homer, Horace, Plutarch, and Epictetus to Machiavelli, Milton, and Keats, among many others. These are by no means hagiographical appreciations, though, for Jacobs foregrounds the ways in which their sensibilities may offend ours and argues, calmly but ardently, for ways in which to reckon with Aristotleâs sexism, Humeâs racism, Edith Whartonâs anti-Semitism, without banishing the writers themselves altogether.
Jacobsâs voice is at once learned and warmly intimate, addressed, as the bookâs subtitle suggests, to the individual reader. But an urgent concern for the body politic undergirds these arguments, as well. Though he never states it directly, it seems clear that among the things Jacobs seeks in this book is a way of thinking about human relationships that transcends the so-called âidentity politicsâ of our current political momentâand indeed of every moment preceding ours. (The question âwho is my neighbor?â is not, after all, a new one.) How can we acknowledge the sins of the past and the persistent injustices of the present without surrendering giddily to self-righteousness and condemning the âwickedâ other side? In a way, this book is an intervention at the battle lines of the culture war. One such front is between the insights of all that has been subsumed under the rather crude label of âCritical Race Theoryâ on the one hand, and those denouncing the supposed excesses of critically examining a cherished national past on the other. Engaging with a quotation from political scientist Mark Lilla, Jacobs writes:
. . . striving to understand the people of the past âas they understood themselves,â is a mark of fairness to them; but it is also good for us. [Lilla] points out that “the concept of âracismâ is today applied to everything from theories of racial inferiority and calls for genocide to unintended âmicroaggressionsâ against particular individuals,â which means that âa small forest of useful concepts that used to grow between âracismâ and âwoke-nessââblindness, stereotyping, prejudice, bigotryâhas been cleared. Consequently, we are losing the ability to understand how people in the past thought about their attitudes and actions, and therefore are losing the ability to make proportionate moral judgments.â That we simplify our judgments in the cause of triage, the management of information overload, is understandable, but the resulting impulsiveness leaves us unable to count, or even to acknowledge, the costs of our simplifications. We thereby become uncharitable to our ancestorsâand to ourselves, whom we are depriving of one of the most vital traits imaginable: âthe ability to make proportionate moral judgments.â
This is beautiful and vital stuff, even if I found myself wondering whether his repeated emphasis on proportionality risked amounting to a kind of reflexive âboth-sides-ismâ and thus to an implicit argument for withdrawal from worldly political concerns altogether.
In the bookâs ninth and final chapter, for example, Jacobs performs a splendid close reading of Seamus Heaneyâs âSandstone Keepsake,â in which the poet describes himself âwading a single beach on Inishowen,â along the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Though surrounded by the tension of the Troubles and surveilled by wary British soldiers, when he lifts from the water âa wet red stoneâ the poetâs mind travels to the distant past, the stone transformed in his imagination to the heart of Henry of Almain and the cold water to the river of boiling blood in which Henryâs murderer, the English aristocrat Guy de Montfort, is condemned to stand in Danteâs Inferno. This obscure tangle of medieval history, literature, and the political turmoil of the 1980s parts easily before Jacobs, who explains how Heaneyâs poem links the Irish Troubles to the thirteenth-century Baronsâ War against King Henry III and the papal politics that formed the background for Guy de Montfortâs murderous revenge on Henry of Almain. The power of Heaneyâs poetic imagination, he suggests, is emancipatory:
As Heaney held the wet red stone he wasnât in the Republic of Ireland; he dwelt in his own âfree state of image and allusion,â his own populous mental world; the British soldier with his âtrained binocularsâ understood that the man âout for the evening in scarf and wadersâ posed no threat: he was ânot worth bothering about.â Not a militant, nor any sort of revolutionary; not even an activist; but rather one who venerates, one who attends worshipfully to what he loves: stones in salt water, old poems long remembered, things that can be held close as keepsakes.
For Jacobs, what is admirable here is not only the poetâs historical imagination but his political quietism:
People in Ireland always wanted Heaney to take sides, to join the revolution or at least to speak out; but he was, by temperament and perhaps also conviction, âone of the venerators,â and therefore ânot about to set things wrong or right.â
Heaneyâs reluctance to intervene was, Jacobs observes, âDisappointing to the activists, surely.â
This is not the only moment in which âactivistâ occurs as pejorative, and it struck me that while Jacobs does a fine job of parsing Heaneyâs allusions to Dante, he never mentionsâamid all the cautionary talk about âtaking sidesâ and an oblique critique of âactivismââthe Vestibule of Danteâs hell, where dwell the Opportunists, those who never took a side:
These are the nearly soulless
whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise.
They are mixed here with that despicable corps
They are mixed here with that despicable corps
of angels who are neither for God nor Satan,but only for themselves.
(Canto III, 32-36, tr. Ciardi)
Jacobs is not, of course, advocating neutrality of this damnably selfish sort, but in a book that borrows its structural principle of an ascent up a âwinding stairâ from Yeats, I would have welcomed a pause along our climb just long enough to stipulate that while the summons to a more tranquil mind means resisting what Yeats himself called âpassionate intensity,â it is by no means an invitation or excuse to âlack all convictionâ about the urgent problems assailing the world.
But then, this is not, as Jacobs said, a book written primarily for students. If it were, perhaps he would have warned more explicitly about the perils of civic insouciance as well as outrage.
That said, this is a lovely bookâindeed, it is a book for lovers. Readers who make it all the way to the conclusion (whether driven by duty or drawn on, as I was, by the pleasure of his prose) will find that Jacobs brings to this stirring climax the argument along which he has been winding:
. . . ideas and ambitions arenât worth much unless they are transformed into a settled disposition, a habit of mind. And what Iâm 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 voice from our past, from the worldâs past.
Attention is indeed, as Simone Weil has suggested, a form of love, but Jacobs enlarges on the idea to suggest that to pay attention is to confer love on more than just the object of that attention: â. . . what I counsel is to give the dead the blood of our attention for our own sake, to enrich and strengthen our identities, to make ourselves more solid and less tenuousâand then . . . to use the solidity we have gained to help us make meaningful promises to the futureâ (emphasis mine). He continues, âThereâs an important sense in which we cannot use the past to love ourselves unless we also learn to love our ancestors. We must see them not as others but as neighborsâand then, ultimately, as kin, as members of our (very) extended family.â
There may be readers who regard this attempt to dissolve tribalism in the solvent of love of the broader human tribe as naive or facile. Others, though, might find it quite radical, for what Jacobs isnât doingâand what he forbids us doingâis averting our eyes from the sins as well as the merits of the past. In a discussion of Frederick Douglassâs speech, âThe Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,â in which Douglass praises Americaâs founders as âgreat menâ before proceeding to condemn their beliefs and actions with respect to slavery, Jacobs writes, âThe 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.â
Whether or not reading old books can make us good, devouring this delicious new one surely canât hurt, for in it we find a mode of reading that summons us to charity and honesty, and thus to humility, making us less assured of our own righteousness and less frantic at the apparent folly of our living neighbors.
Dr. Benjamin Utter has worked as a paperboy, a field hand, a sandwich artist, a barista, door-to-door salesman, a valet, a bookseller, an English teacher in China, a Peabody Hotel Duck Master, a 7th-grade history teacher, and a Christian heavy metal radio DJ, but since none of those jobs offered many chances to teach Chaucer, he settled down to a respectable life as an assistant professor of English, and currently teaches at Ouachita Baptist University. He has published on the Arthurian poetry of Charles Williams and on medieval iconography in modern American gun culture, among other things, and written an illustrated children’s book, “Gladys the Grayish Green Dragon,” which his children rate “not as good as Harry Potter.”
