Breaking Bread with the Dead

★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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WHAT'S BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD ABOUT?
If I tried to summarize this book (unless I read it 3-4 more times), it would be out-of-control, just me blathering on for 4+ pages. So, let's have mercy on us all and just appropriate what's on the publisher's site:

>From the author of HOW TO THINK and THE PLEASURES OF READING IN AN AGE OF DISTRACTION, a literary guide to engaging with the voices of the past to stay sane in the present

W. H. Auden once wrote that “art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present–and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our “personal density.”

Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every thought–plus a sense that history offers no resources, only impediments to overcome or ignore. The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs's answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know.

What can Homer teach us about force? How does Frederick Douglass deal with the massive blind spots of America's Founding Fathers? And what can we learn from modern authors who engage passionately and profoundly with the past? How can Ursula K. Le Guin show us truths about Virgil's female characters that Virgil himself could never have seen? In Breaking Bread with the Dead, a gifted scholar draws us into close and sympathetic engagement with texts from across the ages, including the work of Anita Desai, Henrik Ibsen, Jean Rhys, Simone Weil, Edith Wharton, Amitav Ghosh, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Italo Calvino, and many more.

By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer.

BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD

* This is not necessarily true for you, just me.

“Why read?”

“Why read old books?”

“How do you live a good and tranquil life?”

All of these are questions I often think about. Alan Jacobs also considers those questions, and the result of his thinking is Breaking Bread with the Dead.

Alan Jacobs starts by looking at the storms (I'd call them Category 5 hurricanes) that blow around us in contemporary life by means of the onslaught of news and social media. To survive, to stand, to move ahead amid the storms requires, he tells us, “personal density,” a term that comes from one of the characters in Thomas Pynchon's book, Gravity's Rainbow. Jacob writes, “...the development of personal density, to which reading old books can be a vital contribution...might provide...a port, for however brief a time, in the storm.”

How to achieve this personal density? We tend, according to Jacobs, to spend time with others like us. “But I believe,” Jacob tells us, “that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.” Jacobs reminds us that the French thinker Simone Weil that looking for eternal truth can be difficult to do when we deal with our actual neighbor because emotions tend to be close to the surface. Books, on the other hand, offer some emotional distance.

One of my favorite parts of this book is where Jacobs shares some thoughts from Italian novelist Italo Calvino about reading old books. “Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.” Jacobs goes on to share a little more Calvino: “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.” During the process of encountering a book from the past, “When we perceive some sudden dissonance between ourselves and those people, we should not run from that dissonance but straight toward it,”Jacob asserts. Further he adds, “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.”

I loved this marvelous conclusion by Jacobs, where he talks about deeply meeting with people from the past: “When we own our kinship to those people, they may come alive for us not just as exemplars of narrowness and wickedness that we have overcome, but as neighbors and even as teachers. When we acknowledge that even when they go far astray they do so in ways that we surely would have, had we been formed as they were, we extend them not just attention but love, the very love that we hope our descendants will extend to us.”

Author Alan Jacobs is interviewed at The Trinity Forum here.

Summary: A defense of reading old books as a way to counter an orientation toward bias. 

I have read many of Alan Jacobs' books. I think he is one of the best essayists writing. I think I have read all of his books except a couple. Unlike some writers, he is not someone with one primary theme and hits that same theme repeatedly.

In some ways, Breaking Bread with the Dead could be considered an update to CS Lewis' defense of reading old books from Lewis' introduction to On the Incarnation by Athanasius. And if you have not read that one, you should. It is brief and accessible, and classic for a reason.

But Jacobs' is not just updating Lewis, he is also expanding on why old books matter, especially today. One of the biggest reasons modern people object to old books, besides the orientation toward the new, is concern about how past sins are normalized in old books. Those sins, like the support of slavery or sexism, etc., are discussed extensively in a section about Frederick Douglass' reading of an old book about public speaking that inspired Douglass' work. I think Jacobs' is working well here, but his reasoning did not entirely convince me. Part of the argument I agree with is that different eras have different orientations, and we need different orientations. And I appreciate that Douglass was inspired by a book not written in his own context.

But it is different for Douglass to read a book that had a section about an enslaved person being freed and finding those words to inspire his own freedom, and readers today reading books by people that justified slavery. In Douglass' case, he had minimal access to books and only a few books that he could have read. Today we have almost unlimited access to books. I am not saying we should never read books by people that have views that we disagree with. But I do think that in making his argument for reading things that we may disagree with, Jacobs made some leaps that were unpersuasive, even as his larger argument, I do agree with.

We should read old books and books from outside of our culture to be challenged by the different ways that both people from other cultures and older cultures think. But there are people from the past and other cultures who agree with us in many areas but use different thinking patterns to get there. I was listening to an interview with Mika Edmonson earlier this week, and he was asked about his tweet saying, (my paraphrase), “that it was possible to have a good theological library and not own books by slaveholders.” We can read old books by people that also at the time of slavery decried slavery in their own time.

One of the unaddressed issues in this book is how some of the old ideas were used for purposes that matter to how we receive them today. For instance, in The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, Joel McDurmon spends a long section on Robert Dabney and how many, including John Piper, still recommend Robert Dabney's books because of Dabney's position on biblical theology. But as McDurmon points out, Dabney's biblical theology was expressly to uphold white supremacy (in the sense of racial superiority). We do not need a biblical theology that was designed for the purpose of white supremacy when we also have biblical theology that was not designed for the purpose of white supremacy. We also have books like Plain Theology for Plain People, a book of theology initially published in 1890 at the same time Dabney was writing that has a traditional biblical theology but was also written by a Black church pastor who was originally born into slavery. Charles Octavius Boothe was one of the early pastors of Dexter Ave Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL, later pastored by Martin Luther King Jr.

Alan Jacobs is advocating discernment. And he is advocating reading books that will challenge us and our current ideas. Jacobs' central metaphor is that we are sharing table fellowship (the Eucharist) with authors who are also Christians but may have different ideas. I agree with this framing and that we should seek to be challenged by those who do not agree with us in every aspect of our thinking. And I agree with Jacobs that we must love and read charitably other Christians. I also agree that there are various benefits to seeking out old books, even if I do not read as many old books as I think I should. And while I am not entirely convinced by all of his reasoning, I think Jacobs makes a reasonable argument about why we should not automatically dismiss authors with ideas that we find objectionable. As with all things, discernment matters, and part of how we grow in our discernment is by experience, which means we need to be expanding our reading and thinking.