Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

Surely this is just the theme with which we began: the way an environment of high informational density produces people of low personal density. A world that seems to give us infinite choice actually makes choice nearly impossible: the informational context chooses for us.

For Berry, the vital distinction is between projecting and promising: “The ‘projecting’ of ‘futurologists’ uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one only to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else’s future.”

We live thinly in our instant, and don’t know what we don’t know.

but there’s something also to be said for that moment when a figure from the past who has perfectly anticipated something you already believe then turns around and says something that puzzles or alienates you. That is, I firmly believe, the greater moment of enlightenment: the moment of double realization.

That environment also creates the need for moral triage: for straightforward binary decisions about whether we admire or despise a given person.

And it is in agreeing to a continuation with the past, not in pronouncing a universal verdict either for or against, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, that we increase our personal density.

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 ancestors—and to ourselves, whom we are depriving of one of the most vital traits

She thinks it’s a valuable exercise to project ourselves imaginatively into the mental and emotional world of people from the past: not to think of what we would do if we were in that situation, but of how that experience felt, immediately, to them, to people shaped and formed as they were.

it really is far too easy for us to map old books and their authors onto our familiar, comfortable categories—“inspirational texts,” “meditation, mindfulness, and other spiritual exercises”—a mapping that renders us unable to hear a strange word, a different word, a word that takes us beyond what we already know.