Reading Guide for Breaking Bread with the Dead

Jacobs uses a few curious and technical terms to frame his recommendations for how we might gain greater tranquility by reading old books.

Social Acceleration
This term was coined by German Social Theorist Hartmut Rosa. Rosa describes modernity as a time of increasing social acceleration. He identifies this in three interconnected ways.

1. Technological Acceleration – machines, travel, and communication move increasingly faster and faster.
   
2. Social Change – Social practices, values, and norms change rapidly. Institutions, jobs, careers, families shift dramatically in a short period of time.
   
3. The Pace of Life – People subjectively experience constant busyness. People feel like they need to do more things in less time. Multitasking has become the norm.
   

Here are two resources to learn more from Rosa about his notion of Social Acceleration.

• Hartmut Rosa TED talk on Social Acceleration
• Interview with Hartmut Rosa - Social acceleration and the need for speed

Frenetic Standstill
In describing our experience in the midst of Social Acceleration, Rosa uses the term Frenetic Standstill, which he adapts from French Social Theorist Paul Virilio. This is the experience of running in place. Everything around us is moving with ever increasing speed. We are doing more and more in less and less time. Because of this we are constantly active, which makes us tense, agitated, stressed, and on edge. We feel like we are moving fast and furious but not going anywhere.

Presentism
Related to Social Acceleration and Frenetic Standstill is the notion of Presentism. This is the condition in which we are focused on the immediate, on the now. We are trapped in a perpetual present, in which we move rapidly from one thing to the next. Jacobs refers to this as the “tyranny of the present.”  He uses presentism to describe a couple of things – (1)The overload of information that leads us to feeling overwhelmed. Since we can hardly handle the present we ignore the past. And (2)We are so focused on the present and the rightness of our views and moral sensibilities that we tend to view the past with disdain.

Personal Density and Temporal Bandwidth
These notions come from Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. A character in the novel, Kurt Mondaugen, establishes what he calls “Mondaugen’s Law.” Mondaugen’s Law states that “Personal density is directly proportionate to temporal bandwidth.”

For Jacobs, temporal bandwidth involves expanding our “now”–our sense of what is relevant and what is present to us. It means to extend our attention into the past and to imaginatively extend it into the future, so our sense of our now–what is present before us-is expanded. Temporal bandwidth gives us perspective and relief from the information overload of the present. And Temporal bandwidth leads to greater personal density. When we lack personal density we lack stability and firmness. This leads us to be extremely vulnerable to whatever happens to be blowing through our particular environment at any given time. When we lack personal density, we tend to feel unstable, restless, and anxious. In commenting on the importance of increasing our personal density, Jacobs points to the Apostle Paul’s exhortation “that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Ephesians 4:14). Personal density is our anchor or ballast to withstand with calmness and resolve the wind and storms around us. For Jacobs, increasing our temporal bandwidth will strengthen our personal density which will give us greater tranquility.

Jacobs recognizes the unhelpful tendency to tell people to stop doing something that is harmful to them, without telling people what to do instead. We stop at “don’t do X!” without providing “do Y instead.” For example, it is common to encourage people to stay off social media, limit their news consumption, and turn off and lock up their smart phones– and we leave it at that. Jacobs wants to give people something to do when they stop doing the things that disturb their peace and tranquility. That something is to read old books. He is serious in describing this book as a self-help book. He genuinely thinks that reading old books is good for us! Keep this in mind as your make your way through the book.

Consider your own personal experience and ask yourself a few questions.

Are you restless and agitated and in need of greater tranquility in your life? If so, what causes this? What have you tried to gain greater tranquility?

Do you find yourself overwhelmed by an overload of information and claims on your attention? If so, how do you deal with this?

Do you read old books? If so, what is your posture in reading them? How might you benefit from reading old books?

• Jacobs states that his calling is that of a teacher. Think about what makes good teachers good teachers. Why is this significant to keep in mind in approaching the book?
   
• Note Jacobs’s description of the audience of this book – “I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens” (p. xii). Note how he places himself among the collective group of readers and citizens.
  
• As you read, keep in mind the genre decision Jacobs makes–to write in the form of the essay. Note his intriguing explanation for his choice of the essay. “I write this way because none of the things I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition” (p. xiii)

Here’s a link to Horace’s letter on Tranquility - Horace Letter to Lollius Maximus on Tranquility

• Why do we long for a  tranquil mind?
• What keeps us from having a tranquil mind? What does Jacobs mean by the “tyranny of everyday anxieties” (p. 6).
• Describe and evaluate Horace’s advice for cultivating a tranquil mind.
• Reflect on Jacobs’s claim that “To read old books is to get an education in possibility” (p. 8), and how this contributes tranquility in our contemporary age.

• The middle paragraph on p. 12 sets the stage for the book – reflect on Jacobs’s description of our approach to the past – defilement, the conditions that lead to this – information overload and social acceleration, and his description of our common treatment – informational triage.
• Listen to a podcast episode from For the Life of the World – The Yale Center for Faith & Culture - Time, Acceleration, and Waiting. This podcast interview with Andrew Root draws upon the work of Hartmut Rosa and addresses the need for patience and attentiveness in an impatient, distracted, and accelerating world. Connect this discussion with the description and argument of the book.
• Reflect on Hartmut Rosa’s evocative description of our current state of existence as a “frenetic standstill,” and consider how engaging the past can help us break out of the feeling that we are “constantly in motion but going nowhere” (p. 15).
• Consider the curious phrases from Thomas Pynchon–personal density and temporal bandwidth–and how accumulating greater personal density and expanding our temporal bandwidth will aid in our escape from our condition of frenetic standstill.
• How serious are we to take Jacobs and his claim that this book is a “self-help” book? Or, better, how does this descriptor shape the way we approach the reading of this book?
• Why does Jacobs think that his recommendation for attention to the past is a hard sell? And consider the benefits he claims we will receive if we buy what he is selling: “I want to argue that you can’t understand the place and time you’re in by immersion; the opposite’s true. You have to step out and away and back and forward, and you have to do it regularly. Then, you come back to the here and now, and say: Ah. That’s how it is” (p. 23).

• How do “table fellowship” and “breaking bread with the dead” enrich our understanding of paying attention to the past?
• Reflect on Jacobs’s approach to the past, which involves giving our attention to the dead and inviting the voices of the past to shock us by their difference from us.
• Note both the challenge and the benefit of engaging difference in the past. Consider Jacobs’s invitation – “The real challenge, but also the real opportunity, of breaking bread with the dead comes when the dead say something that freaks us out–freaks us out to the point that we are strongly tempted to turn away in disgust and horror. But those may be just the moments when we need to steel ourselves to keep giving the blood of our attention” (p. 31).
• What is Jacob’s getting at in his account of the professor whose student refuses to finish reading The House of Mirth, because of Wharton’s overt antisemitism?
• Note how Jacobs reminds us that reading old books and engaging past voices cannot collapse the difference between our time and their time, between us and them. “Reading 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” (36).
• “The past that ties us to people in ways that hurt us also ties us to people in ways that make healing possible” (p. 39). Reflect on how you have experienced the truth of this statement.
• What can we learn from Simone Weil’s attention to the Iliad in 1939 – her essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”?

• Why does Jacobs think the common advice for readers to “set aside their modern assumptions in order to enter into the world of the old text” is bad advice? Do you agree?

• What does Jacobs mean by “thickets of convention”? How does this help us read great thinkers of the past? What about people who were able to cut their way through these thickets? Who are they and why are they important?

• Identify defaults we have inherited, and the costs of these defaults. What do we need to do to remove these defaults, and how does reading old books help us with this?

• How does positive selection and negative selection affect who we are willing to read from the past and how we read and evaluate them? Put a bit differently, how does Jacobs guide us in judging characters from the past?

• What does Jacobs ask us to consider as we judge figures from the past and as we reflect on our own selves, our vices and virtues?
• Take time to read slowly and reflect patiently on the final paragraph of the chapter. “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” (p. 58).

• Consider Jacobs’s description of how Machiavelli and Plutarch examined, appropriated, and drew from prominent figures in the past. Are there good examples of how we might do this for ourselves? For reference, see David Brooks, The Road to Character – in this book, Brooks provides narratives of a number of historical figures who demonstrated exemplary character, including: Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, A. Philip Randoph, Bayard Rustin, George Eliot, Samuel Johnson, Michel de Montaigne, and St. Augustine.
  
• What do you make of Jacobs’s warning that while it is true that we tend to come to quick conclusions about how a book or person in the past falls short or fails, “we can also get ourselves into something like the opposite problem–a determination to read in a sanitizing way–when faced with a text that we know is in some sense a ‘classic’ but which offends, or seems to offend” (pp. 70-71).
  
• Do you agree with Jacobs when he writes, “ ‘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 you own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse” (p. 72).
  
• Reflect on the remarks by Italo Calvino that Jacobs highlights and commends to us. “A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.” And Jacobs’s commentary, “Both halves of this sentence are essential. The reader who instantly translates the subject or story of a book into present-day terms often is not having a genuine encounter with the book at all. … But that the book I am reading is somehow connected to my life is an essential ambience to reading, ‘something we cannot do without’” (pp. 73-74).
  
• Why does Jacobs laud Daniel Mendelsohn’s reading of the Aeneid and dismiss Philip’s Hoare’s reading of Moby-Dick?
  
• What can we take from Jacobs’s brief autobiographical account of how he came to learn how to read old books well?

• What does generous reading look like? Why is it needed, and why is it hard to come by?
• Reflect on Jacobs’s account of Rhys retelling of Jane Eyre and Le Guin’s retelling of the Aneid.
• What do you make of the imagery of wrestling with the past, like Jacob wrestled with a mighty figure by the Jabbok, in search of a blessing?

• How do the personal stories of Peter Abrahams, Zadie Smith, and Frederick Douglass illustrate the kind of reading Jacobs commends?
  
  As he writes, “The experiences of these two men [Abrahams and Douglass] testify to the enormous power of reading. But the experiences of Abrahams and Douglass also show us that that power arises in some cases from likeness–from the sense that that could be me speaking–and from difference–that is something very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both. Our presentists moment overemphasizes the former and neglects the latter–or rather, rarely even acknowledges the latter. We tend to get at the need for otherness in different ways” (p. 99).

• How does Jacobs’s proposal to read old books connect with a contemporary encounter with people from other cultures who speak different languages, eat different food, celebrate different customs?
• Reflect on the quote from Terence, “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”
  How does this relate to the reading of old books, to breaking bread with the dead?

• Read Beth Barton Schweiger, "Seeing Things: Knowledge and Love in History" for clear and wise insight from a historian into how we are to see, love, and be a neighbor to the dead.

• How does the current interest in Stoicism act as a “test case” for the approach to reading for which Jacobs advocates? How does Donna Zuckerberg criticize what she refers to as the Red Pill Stoics, and how does Jacobs question Zuckerberg’s reading of the classical antiquity?
• Note the significant difference between using books as instruments and viewing books as teachers. “In this model [that employed by Zuckerberg and the so-called Red Pill Stoics], whether employed by the right or the left or by some other political agenda that doesn’t fit on that scale, the books of the past may well be useful instruments but they cannot be our teachers. They cannot teach us in part because we are refusing to listen to what they have to say that doesn’t fit into our preexisting categories” (p. 109).
• How do we go about striving to understand the people of the past “as they understood themselves?” Why is this both fair to the people of the past and good for us?
• Read Frederick Douglass, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro". What does this speech tell us about Douglass? Why does Jacobs spend so much time on this speech? How does it fit with his approach to engaging the past? Do you agree with Jacobs’s reading of this penetrating address?

• Why does Jacobs maintain that Dorothy Osborne is “a complicated case for the modern reader” (p. 127)?
• Reflect on Jacobs’s weighty string of claims as he examines Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 – “…the questions germane to our moment are precisely the ones that are hardest for us to assess fairly, because of our emotional investment in them” (p. 132) … “That particular lesson [“that human beings–even women!–have the right to self-determination and are not morally required to set aside their own well-being for the sake of the social order into which they happen to be born”] we have learned so well that it can be hard to remember that it had to be learned” (p. 132) …  [Hnath’s sequel makes] “Ibsen’s original drama stand forth more brightly, to make its original question–Does this woman dare escape her doll’s house–seem alive again. As though we had not answered it definitively” (p. 133) … “These complications of perception are essential to the value of reading the past–they are the chief means, I think, by which increasing our temporal bandwidth increases our personal density. Yes, there is a cost to this, and we have to fight our triage instincts to get to the point of experiencing, along with the people of the past, the choices that shaped their lives” (p. 133).
• What do you make of Jacobs’s claim that “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. Including our own condition, which is likewise compounded of wisdom and nonsense” (p. 134).
• What would it look like if we were to follow Jacobs’s (self-help) advice to “not run from dissonance but straight toward it” (p. 138). Here’s the full quote: “When we encounter real people from the past, like Dorothy Osborne, and fictional ones, like Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House or Jo March in Little Women, our instinctive responses tell a tale about our values, our commitments, our assumptions, our hopes, our fears–and about theirs. When we perceive some sudden dissonance between ourselves and those people, we should not run from that dissonance but straight toward it. This testing of our responses against those of our ancestors is an exciting endeavor–a potentially endless table conversation, though, again, one we can suspend at any time” (p. 138).

• Jacobs returns to his lament about our cultural moment and our being trapped by presentism – “…those who know only their own moment in history know little of that–and that they, and their whole culture, are worse for their ignorance. We live thinly in our instant, and don’t know what we don’t know” (p. 143). How is this not only a problem for us, but also for our descendants?
• Reflect on how the following–seemingly contradictory–statements can be equally true.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” (L. P. Hartley).

“the past is never dead; it’s not even past” (William Faulkner).

• Reflect on Jacobs’s account of the relationship among our present, our engagement with the past, and our connection to the future–in terms of increasing our temporal bandwidth, which will enrich our personal density.
• How does Wendell Berry help us see our need for accountability, standing by our words, and making promises to the future?

How can we cultivate the disposition of love as we seek to break bread with the dead? A love that includes humility, generosity, gratitude, and grace. A love that is patient and kind; does not envy or boast; is not arrogant or rude; a love that does not insist on its own way; is not irritable or resentful; a love that does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. A love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. A love that never ends.