On Temporal Tranquility
by Cheryl Sadowski
A Review of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs
By making time to read the writers of long ago and far away, he believes we can be called into thoughtful dialogue with the past in a way that enriches our perspective and helps free us from the ever-blooming, buzzing, immediate Now.
192pp., hardcover, $25
Penguin Press
September 8, 2020
ISBN 9781984878403
Alan Jacobs is the kind of professor I wish I’d had more of in college—passionate about literature and history, with a tender ability to frame the past so we might live more nobly in the future.
I brought Jacobs’ latest book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, with me on a short vacation in the Shenandoah Valley. Exasperated by the daily staccato of Zoom meetings, news feeds, and social media, my husband and I rented a rustic cabin without internet or cell phone service on the banks of the Shenandoah River, where we watched cormorants, bald eagles, and wood ducks go about their days.
Our glowing screens and reflexive Google searches were replaced by the cycle of light and dark, by wildlife waking and sleeping. Time felt elastic, spacious. I spent nearly an hour watching a wasp try to escape from its unfortunate position caught between two doors. The wasp had entered through a tear in the screen and could easily depart the same way, only it appeared to have no sense of its past, nor the freedom possible in revisiting its steps. Instead, it clung to the surface and spun round in place, unable to see beyond its present, rigid reality.
In his book, Jacobs observes the same condition of frenetic standstill in our contemporary society. Our struggle, he writes, is to “overcome the gravitational pull of the moment, to achieve escape velocity from presentism.” He describes how “information overload and social acceleration work together to create a paralyzing feedback loop” that erodes deep attention and forces us into a fierce kind of mental triage that is overly simplistic, lacking in nuance, peremptory, and irreversible. It calls to mind an image of frenzied shoppers ruthlessly combing grocery store aisles for the sacred triad of milk, bread, and toilet paper prior to a storm, or say possibly, in the throes of a pandemic.
Jacobs is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University; his hermeneutics are naturally in the arena of cultural classics. By making time to read the writers of long ago and far away, he believes we can be called into thoughtful dialogue with the past in a way that enriches our perspective and helps free us from the ever-blooming, buzzing, immediate Now. History does not lie before us as static text on parchment but stands up on the page to actively fulfill its purpose, as described by nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes—
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.
Jacobs recognizes his defense of the past is a difficult sell, especially for young people in an algorithmic, market-driven world with endless channels of streaming programming and You may also like options. “Why trot out old cultural chestnuts [when] the newest, freshest thing is right at their fingertips?” he quotes one screenwriter as saying. Add to this new social challenges as to what constitutes a classic and who decides, and it’s clear Jacobs knows he is entering the haunted forest of fighting trees on his way to Oz.
In his quest to champion writers from the past whose words deserve to be read—Homer, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglas, Edith Wharton, Simone Weil, W.E.B DuBois, Ursula LeGuin, to name a few—Jacobs carries a shield of formidable concepts that soundly redress the myriad objections brought about by narrow, hyper-reactive presentism.
Drawing from language originally coined by Thomas Pynchon, he connects reading past works to the idea of “temporal bandwidth”—that is, our ability to dwell in the past and the future—and the role of temporal bandwidth in increasing “personal density”—the ability to live in discomfort in the face of ideas and opinions we disagree with or find odious owing to the time and circumstances in which they were written. “Breaking Bread with the Dead is at the heart of this project,” he writes, “sitting with our ancestors and learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us.”
If we are so easily blown about like an agitated windsock by our encounters with unlikeness, how can we possibly expect to expand the table of fellowship to include others who might benefit from or be changed by encountering us?
Indeed, it is the cultivation of anti-fragility that Jacobs encourages. If we are so easily blown about like an agitated windsock by our encounters with unlikeness, how can we possibly expect to expand the table of fellowship to include others who might benefit from or be changed by encountering us? How can we enjoin others to live prudently in the present and providentially towards the future if we cannot grasp that the arc of justice requires an unenlightened and unholy past from which to bend?
Breaking Bread with the Dead requires mental fitness. However, there are a few drily humorous moments when I laughed aloud; for example, when Jacobs sees fit to remind us of our advantage when reading the works of our ancestors in that they are, after all, dead. They are unable to explain or account for their vices and misdeeds; their silence compels us to consider the political and cultural headwinds in which they lived and operated. Jacobs calls upon us to bless them as worthy opponents with whom we share the “virtues and vices, foolishness and wisdom, blindness and insight” of our mutual human condition.
The dead require nothing from us, he writes, only the blood of our attention so that we might find some “kernel of authenticity” between them and ourselves. Alongside temporal bandwidth and personal density, a genuine inclination for authenticity is required for kinship with the past. For Jacobs, it’s where the moment of greatest enlightenment occurs, “the moment of double realization”:
To confront the reality that the very same people who give us rich wisdom can also talk what seems to us absolute nonsense (and vice-versa) is an education in the human condition.
There is no doubt that engaging in sympathetic reading of classic works requires “a settled disposition, a habit of mind” and attentiveness that can be difficult to achieve in a media technopoly that keeps us twitching anxiously with outrage over the present moment. There are other challenges, too, like the increasing erosion of the liberal arts education in favor of STEM- and career-focused education. The universe of long-form readers is dwindling and in dire need of members and advocates.
Writers need readers, universities need students, and being an autodidact can be lonely.
Which brings me to my only criticism, though it has nothing to do with Jacobs’ book. As a lifelong reader of literature and history, I eagerly embarked in my mid-fifties upon a masters degree in the liberal arts to enrich my understanding of the wider world, and I am heartened every day at the perspective and equanimity it has afforded me. So I was disappointed by a rather stark statement on Jacobs’s website that he can “no longer in good conscience recommend that anyone pursue graduate study in the humanities”—a peculiar admission from someone so passionate about reading and writing. Perhaps keeping a classical liberal education alive in a culture of presentism and righteous outrage has become downright draining, but it can’t be hopeless. Writers need readers, universities need students, and being an autodidact can be lonely.
I’d like to think we could talk it over, Professor Jacobs and I, while breaking bread among others who are drawn to books from the past.
Breaking Bread with the Dead is a reminder of our agency when we read—that we need not be trapped like the wasp on the screen door, reacting to what is most urgently and stridently put before us. Jacobs is not asking “for instant kinship across the centuries.” He is inviting us to sit in fellowship, to take the past seriously enough to argue with it, and to revel in the tension and vitality of difference that makes a stronger, more meaningful future.
Cheryl Sadowski writes creative nonfiction from Northern Virginia, where she works in nonprofit management. Her writing explores memory, time, natural and cultural landscapes. Cheryl's work has appeared in The Broadkill Review, EcoTheo Review, After the Art, and the 2020 Bay to Ocean Anthology. Follow Cheryl's words and pictures on Instagram and Twitter @cherylsadowski
