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

You don’t silence the part of you that sees the problems with the book, its errors, its moral malformations; neither do you silence the part of you that responds so warmly to that “utopian moment.”

This contrast suggested to Lévi-Strauss a more general lesson, which he names “the paradox of civilization”: its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufact

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

that power arises in some cases from likeness—from the sense that that could be me speaking—and from difference—that is someone very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both.

We may not know that we can change the default settings of the media machine; we may know but lack the time and energy to do so. And so those settings continue to reinforce the presentism that they’re claiming merely to reflect. By reading and considering the past, we cut through the thick, strong vines that bind our attention to the things of the

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.

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

That is, a book becomes a classic for you in part because of its power to compel you to hear something that you not only hadn’t thought but might not believe, or might not want to believe.

Surely we have lost something vital when we have lost the power to be startled, even offended, by the voices from the past. To say “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 your own, is