PSYCHOSCAPES: Breaking Bread with the Dead

A strange, Van Gogh "Starry Night" Moon rising over our home 11/30/20
CC Jean Stimmell

Once upon a time, on Sunday afternoons, families would take picnics down by the peacefully-flowing river in their town, both for respite and renewal. But for some time now, the water has been rising until now it has exploded over its banks., plummeting us into a raging torrent, clogged with massive information overlord and deadly whirlpools of competing narratives about what is true. We find ourselves fighting with all our might to hold our head above the maelstrom, just to keep from drowning.

How do we escape this information tsunami? As the title of his latest book suggests, Alan Jacobs has a thoroughly unique answer: “Breaking Bread with the Dead.” He contends that expending all our energy confronting this deluge of information has caused us to lose perspective, throwing us into a shifting moment by moment, fragmentary existence.

Jacobs warns us that we can’t understand our time and place by such immersion; instead, the opposite is true. To gain perspective, we have to step out and away from the present moment and do it on a consistent basis. After that, you step back into the fray “and say: Ah. That’s how it is.”^⁠1

Using another metaphor, Jacobs says our bandwidth has been reduced to zero from constant swimming in the here-and-now. He quotes Simone Weil, who doubted our ability to think into the future because of our “deficient imagination.” Therefore, our only recourse to gain bandwidth is to look to the past. And the way to do that, Jacob says, is by reading old books: “to sit at the table with our ancestors and learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us.”^⁠2

He quotes Horace, the ancient Roman poet, who exhorts himself, and us to “interrogate the writings of the wise.” Because they are wise, they can “draw us out of our daily, our endlessly cyclical, obsessions with money and with “trivial things”—the kinds of obsessions that “harass” us, that “torment” us, that make us jump from thought to thought, or rather emotion to emotion, in “anxious alternation.”^⁠3

I was an easy convert to Jacob’s argument that old books are a gift that can change your life because it happened to me: I got a scholarship out of Pittsfield High to attend Columbia University in the Big Apple, immersing me in old books.

Half the course content in my freshman year consisted of two courses taught in intimate, oak-lined seminar rooms: one on contemporary civilization, starting with Plato; and the other, an overview of the humanities, starting by reading both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The pace was grueling, reading hundreds of pages, along with submitting a two-page paper, in each course every week.

I had to work hard to catch up with many of my classmates who had attended private school. But I preserved, inspired by these brilliant intellects and big ideas from the past.

My other courses were less inspiring. I had gone to college, excited to major in psychology, following my interest in Freud and Jung. But Columbia’s required, year-long introductory course was a laboratory class based on the methods of B.F Skinner, a radical behaviorist. We had to perform experiments around stimulus and response, using long-suffering white rats, some of whom went crazy and had to be put down, the result of giving them electric shocks to ‘teach them avoidance.’

It was both traumatic and bad karma: a taste of what was to come. I dropped out of Columbia my third semester, disappointed with psychology, in addition to feeling lost in the big city. 18 months later, I found myself doing my sabbatical in Vietnam.

Yes, in the confusion of youth, I ignored the wisdom of those great minds like Robert Musil, who counseled his readers to “live in the history of ideas instead of the history of the world”which is circular and repeats its same mistakes).^⁠4 But, in the end, Columbia passed on to me that great gift: introducing me to the pleasure and profit that comes from connecting to the works of great minds and their impactful ideas.

I still read old books today. They expand my wavelength, giving me the space to build a sturdy lifeboat to safely navigate the current tsunami of flotsam and jetsam surging all around us.

xxx

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