Breaking Bread with the Dead:
A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind
by Alan Jacobs
“We wanted tranquil minds. We wanted to escape our addiction to the adrenaline rush of connectivity. When Horace advises Lollius Maximus he also advises himself—indeed, the poem may do the latter more than the former. “Interrogate the writings of the wise,” he counsels. - Alan Jacobs
Having read Alan Jacobs previous book on this subject, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, I found this to be a welcome continuation. Jacobs considers how “information overload and social acceleration work together to create a paralyzing feedback loop….There’s no time to think about anything else than the Now.” As an antidote to this situation he recommends the enriching wisdom that can be discovered through voices from the past, referencing an eclectic assortment of writers and philosophers, including Homer, Horace, Virgil, Simone Weil, Edith Wharton, Italo Calvino, and others. Jacobs considers how to confront and appreciate what these writers have to offer us within the context of their times rather than through the lens of our present-day circumstances, when “the not-Now increasingly takes on the character of an unwelcome and, in its otherness, even befouling imposition.”
As someone who has read and enjoyed classic texts for decades, I thought his case for needing to expand one’s “personal density,” a term he derived from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow made sense. “We lack the density to stay put even in the mildest breeze from our news feeds,” writes Jacobs. “Temporal bandwidth helps give us the requisite density: it addresses our condition of ‘frenetic standstill’ by simultaneously slowing us down and giving us more freedom of movement.” He advocates seeking out authors who express personally held convictions while also appreciating the ideas of past writers. I would recommend this book along with Jacobs' previous book on "The Pleasures of Reading" to all who believe in the importance of reading the "voices of the past".
2 comments:
Interesting! I do so like reading about books/reading.... I'm a great fan of the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quote — 'He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.' When you can look at or live through a situation that happened a hundred or a thousand years ago you have enough perspective NOT to react like an ant whose nest has just been disturbed. I do like that idea of 'Density'. It makes so much sense. I see friends and others continually blown this way and that and they wonder how I can stay so calm and centred - now I have an answer: Density!
CyberKitten,
Thanks for your comment and the Goethe quote. I am also a great fan of Goethe - one of the last true Renaissance men. Sounds like you would like Jacobs' book and his previous The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.
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