Pete's Log: Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs

Entry #2474, (Books, Writing, n such)
(posted when I was 45 years old.)

This evening I finished Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs. I think my favorite result of having read the book is having discovered Professor Jacobs' blog, which now adds some pleasant variety to my RSS reader.

The book is subtitled "A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind" and argues that the literature of the past can help us gain insight that contemporary works can't offer. For the most part Jacobs makes his case well and the book is a fun read. My biggest gripe is that the book is primarily focused on the why of reading old books, when I would have appreciated a bit more how as well.

Near the end, in a footnote, Jacobs writes "no one will do any of the things I counsel in this book without possessing the virtue of stubbornness." And perhaps that has to be enough of a how. I zoned out on the parts of high school and college that tried to teach me to appreciate classic literature, and so while middle-aged me is now enjoying classics like David Copperfield, it's the kind of thing that takes me a month to do and only stubbornness got me through that book. With enough stubbornness, perhaps, the how will become easier with practice.

Incidentally, I originally meant to read this book after completing David Copperfield. Jamie had recently read it at that point and made it sound compelling to me. But somehow I didn't get into it then, so I was newly motivated to read it before I take a stab at Der Zauberberg.

Jacobs includes some examples of individuals who found wisdom or refuge in books of the past. I'm not certain he always makes a convincing case that the benefit of those books was that they were from the past. One example was a young Pakistani woman who, after growing up in the USA for a time, was forced back to Pakistan. There she was not allowed access to books like she had grown up with, but she finds a copy of Little Women at a market and buys and hides it under her mattress. I don't doubt the impact this book had on her life. But could only a book from the past have performed this role?

The title of Jacobs' book comes from a W. H. Auden line: "Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." Jacobs, I've learned, is an expert on Auden and Auden gets a few mentions in the book. Auden also featured prominently in Time Shelter. It's enough of a connection that I was inspired to pick up a book of poems by Auden. Jacobs calls this "reading upstream" and recommends that we read upstream from our favorite authors. I guess there is a little more how after all. Although if you've read my Time Shelter review, you'll know that reading upstream has gotten me in trouble before.

I have many more thoughts on this book and think I may need to reread it. When Jacobs introduces the idea of reading upstream, his starting point for reading upstream from is Tolkien and I happen to be listening to The Fellowship of the Ring at the moment, another connection. A big theme of the book is the information overload of the present and our need to triage the information we process, something which resonates with me. Jacobs is also a Christian scholar, and while there is nothing explicitly Christian about this book, there's a vibe of a certain underlying tension between Christian scholarship and a modern rejection of anything non-scientific. There's a lot there that I can't seem to unpack right now, but it's been weighing on my mind.

Lastly, there's an obvious conundrum inherent to this book, namely would anyone read it that doesn't at some level already agree with its premise? But Jacobs explicitly calls his book a self-help book: "In other words, this is a self-help book. I don't mean that as a joke." And who is going to pick up a self-help book who doesn't already want help?

So if you want help thinking about what the dead can offer us through their words, then I can enthusiastically recommend this book.