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

That he was not like us—that he spoke from a world whose contours made it so different from ours—made those words somehow easier to receive.

Our culture has made certain decisions on our behalf, decisions we individuals have participated in with varying degrees of willingness, and even when we fully endorse those decisions we should not, we must not, be afraid to count the costs—to notice the ways in which the rum we make lacks the savor of that made in the old, abandoned ways, even whe

Temporal bandwidth needs to be extended in both directions. Better to look five thousand years forward and five thousand years backward rather than strain to see only the future, which, being nonexistent, cannot resist us. The past, by contrast, tells of what we need to know but would never think to look for.

Moreover, as Simone Weil points out in a passage I quoted early in this book, the future we imagine is just that: not an alien anything, but what we imagine, what we can imagine. And often it’s what we can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.

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

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

But whether it’s possible to make such oddkin or not, we know what drives the pursuit: a profound desire to engage and reckon with otherness, without eliminating that otherness.

On the one hand, we feel that “everything is moving so fast”—as one philosopher puts it, “Speed is the god of our era”—but often we also simultaneously feel trapped in our social structure and life pattern, imprisoned, deprived of meaningful choice.

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.”