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

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

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.

In this way, Rosa contends, we find ourselves in a state of “frenetic standstill,” constantly in motion but going nowhere.

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

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.”

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.”

I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.

we all need better strategies for making decisions, because the defaults we have inherited have costs that we are rarely aware of—and

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