2.
Table Fellowship
The project of increasing temporal bandwidth that I recommend here requires the opening of our minds and hearts to people from the past so that they stand before us three-dimensionally, in all the ways they resemble us and all the ways they do not. Thus I invoke in this book’s title a line often uttered by the poet W. H. Auden: “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” Breaking bread is at the heart of this project: sitting at table with our ancestors and learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us.
“Table fellowship” was a vexed issue in the ancient world, nowhere more so than among Jews, who had, and of course often still have, elaborate laws regarding food and drink. One of the many points that made Jesus of Nazareth controversial among his fellow Jews was his declaration that all foods are clean. In the book of Acts we are told that the apostle Peter had a kind of vision in which he saw animals of every kind and was told by a disembodied voice to eat them; and when Peter, as an observant Jew, demurred, the voice said to him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
But old habits die hard—as does the feeling that the presence of certain other people, and their food, can make a person unclean, can defile. Thus Peter’s reluctance to accept his vision—and thus the insistence, in the Clementine Homilies, a third-century document widely read by Christians, that that vision was wrong: “We do not . . . take our food from the same table as Gentiles, inasmuch as we cannot eat along with them, because they live impurely . . . our religion compels us to make a distinction.” Who says this? According to the text, Peter—the same Peter who, in the book of Acts, came to the opposite conclusion. The Clementine Homilies are a pious fiction, but they tell us something about the felt need to separate from those who “live impurely”—“for our religion compels us to make a distinction.”
Fortunately, we live in an enlightened society that has transcended such irrational narrowness and exclusivity. Right?
Perhaps not so much. We are certainly still concerned with the clean and the unclean. Consider this recent phenomenon: restaurant diners discovering that a politician or media personality from the Other Side is eating at a nearby table, and agitating to have the offender cast out. We might also think of people who won’t sit at Thanksgiving or Christmas or Passover dinner with those whose politics are simply too alien, too repulsive: and note that it’s not being in the same room that defiles so much as sharing a meal. As the Clementine Homilies say, “when we have persuaded them to have true thoughts, and to follow a right course of action, . . . then we dwell with them.”
If we cannot break bread with our contemporaries who violate our political commitments—whose views seem so alien and wrong that to share a meal with them feels like a kind of defilement—then it would seem that asking us to break bread with the dead is a futile act indeed. But perhaps not.
The dead, being dead, speak only at our invitation: they will not come uninvited to our table. They are at our mercy, like that flock of shades who gather around Odysseus when he comes as a living man to the land of Hades: they remain silent until their tongues are touched with the blood of the living. What the dead we encounter in books demand is only the blood of our attention, which we are free to withhold.
My plea is that we do not withhold it, that we use our power to give them utterance. We can always, if they shock or offend us too greatly, turn aside and render them silent again. And there is a good chance that they will shock us. I want to stress here, and will stress again as we move on, the vital necessity of difference. There is a kind of book about the past that proclaims the value of studying our ancestors, but does so by insisting that the really useful and interesting ones are remarkably like us. So in The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt’s book about the recovery by Poggio Bracciolini, in the early modern period, of the writings of the ancient philosopher-poet Lucretius, we get heroes who are scarcely distinguishable from Stephen Greenblatt and who, conveniently, have all the same enemies.* The Jesus of Laurie Beth Jones’s Jesus, CEO will give bosses plenty of advice for how to manage disgruntled underlings but, you may be sure, will never say, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor.” The popularity in recent years of ancient Stoicism is possible in part because the Stoicism so retrieved doesn’t ask us to change any of our current beliefs, only a few of our practices. (We’ll hear more about this later.)
The British historian David Cannadine has written a book called The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences that, quite commendably, seeks to push back against the many different forms of identity politics, from the right and the left alike, that overemphasize whatever divides us from one another in order to gain some political or social leverage. Cannadine argues that “there is a case for taking a broader, more ecumenical, and even more optimistic view of human identities and relations.” This view “accepts difference and conflict based on clashing sectional identities,” but wants to push beyond that to see “affinities” and to promote “conversations across these allegedly impermeable boundaries of identity, which embody and express a broader sense of humanity that goes beyond our dis-similarities.” Cannadine approvingly quotes Maya Angelou:
I note the obvious differences
Between each sort and type,
But we are more alike, my friends,
Than we are unalike.
I devoutly hope that this is true, and that it is true of those with whom we connect across time as well as across space and social class and race and sex. But I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.
The real challenge, but also the real opportunity, of breaking bread with the dead comes when the dead say something that freaks us out—freaks us out to the point that we are strongly tempted to turn away in disgust and horror. But those may be just the moments when we need to steel ourselves to keep giving the blood of our attention.
In some contexts we understand this: think of the (now quite long) history of arguments to recognize “the other,” to seek out and respect otherness, to hear unheard and unnoticed voices from marginalized communities or groups. People in my line of work have been beating this drum for a long time. To take one vivid example, consider the cultural theorist Donna Haraway’s recent book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, an argument for, in politically vexed times, “staying with the trouble and for making generative oddkin.” (I know that there’s some fancy academic language here but please bear with me—please stay with the trouble.)
“Making generative oddkin”? By that, Haraway means seeking to forge kinship bonds with all sorts of creatures and things—pigeons, for instance. There’s a fascinating early chapter in her book on human interaction with pigeons. Of course, that interaction has been conducted largely on human terms, and Haraway wants to create two-way streets where in the past these paths ran only from humans to everything else. How to get the pigeons to participate willingly in such a project is a question without an obvious answer, but it’s a question that Haraway feels we must ask, because “staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.”*
But here’s the complication: Who gets included in “each other”? Besides pigeons, I mean. Haraway says explicitly that her human kin are “antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people,” and people who share her commitment to “Make Kin Not Babies”: “Pronatalism in all its powerful guises ought to be in question almost everywhere.”
I suspect that—to borrow a tripartite distinction from the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander—most people who use that kind of language are fine with their ingroup (“antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people”) and fine with the fargroup (pigeons), but the outgroup? The outgroup that lives in your city and votes in the same elections you do? Maybe not so much. Does the project of making kin extend to that couple down the street from you who have five kids, who attend a big-box evangelical church, and who voted for the wrong person in the last presidential election? And who, moreover, are a little more likely to talk back than pigeons are? (Even assuming that they might be interested in making kin with Donna Haraway, which, let’s face it, is equally unlikely. Presumably they too would be more comfortable with the pigeons.)
Here, I think, is where my project of increasing temporal bandwidth comes in: it is a way of making kin that is a little less demanding and threatening than dealing with those weirdo neighbors—at least, if we think about the project in the right way.
In 2019 the novelist and teacher Brian Morton published a fascinating essay about his encounter with a student who had tried reading Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth but after fifty pages threw it in the trash. What he believed—rightly—to be Wharton’s overt anti-Semitism, exemplified in a character named Simon Rosedale, appalled him. Throughout the novel Rosedale exhibits, or is thought by the heroine, Lily Bart, to exhibit, an unsettling combination of deference and arrogance, thus this characteristic sentence: “He knew he should have to go slowly, and the instincts of his race fitted him to suffer rebuffs and put up with delays.” The student was justifiably appalled by Wharton’s lofty contempt for Rosedale and said, “I don’t want anyone like that in my house.” We might say that the student could not abide having table fellowship with a writer so overtly and unapologetically bigoted.
As Morton reflected on this encounter, later, he came to believe that—whether or not the student was right to stop reading Wharton’s book—the phrase “I don’t want anyone like that in my house” reflected a misconception. “It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.” But no, thought Morton: “it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.” The author is not a guest at our table; we are a guest at hers.
It’s a lovely metaphor, but (like all metaphors) limited, because if we’re literally sitting at someone’s table it can be difficult to get away without offense or embarrassment. There are many wonderful things about books, but among the most wonderful is that you can close them when you need to, when they become a little too strange, too disturbing. It’s like being able to quit someone’s table instantaneously but without causing trouble or offense. And the fact that you can escape so easily might actually be a good reason not to.
Let’s think again about “making oddkin.” We could have a very long conversation about whether it is easy, or hard, or impossible to forge genuine kinship with animals, especially nondomesticated animals. It’s something people have thought about often, including some philosophers. Wittgenstein was definitively negative about the whole project: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Thomas Nagel was not so sure, and wrote a later-to-be-famous essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” For a more down-to-earth exploration you might want to read Helen Macdonald’s remarkable memoir H Is for Hawk. 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. Any discomfort we experience is very much to the point. Indeed, the loss of otherness may be a bad sign, as Helen Macdonald learned as, in her grief over the death of her father, she drew closer and closer to her goshawk Mabel:
In hunting with Mabel, day after day, I had assumed—in my imagination, of course, but that was all it could ever be—her alien perspective, her inhuman understanding of the world. It brought something akin to madness, and I did not understand what I had done. When I was small I’d thought turning into a hawk would be a magical thing. What I’d read in [T. H. White’s Arthurian fantasy] The Sword in the Stone encouraged me to think it, too, as a good and instructive thing; a lesson in life for the child who would be king. But now the lesson was killing me. It was not at all the same.
For a human to assume an “inhuman understanding of the world” is, necessarily, “something akin to madness.” Mental health lies in seeking difference but always knowing it as difference—not collapsing my identity into that of someone, or something, else.
And this is also true of any legitimate interest in the past. Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is to make the other not identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor. I happen to think that this kind of training is useful in helping me learn to deal with my actual on-the-ground neighbors, though that claim is not central to my argument here, and in any case there’s nothing inevitable about this transfer: I know people who are exquisitely sensitive readers of texts who are also habitually rude to the people who serve them at restaurants. But surely to encounter texts from the past is a relatively nonthreatening, and yet potentially enormously rewarding, way to practice encountering difference.
The French thinker Simone Weil believed this strongly. Weil—who was a very strange kind of religious mystic—believed that in all of our human encounters we should be seeking to discern what is eternally true. She also believed that that is hard to do when we’re dealing with our actual neighbor, because our emotions tend to be so near the surface. (This is why it’s easier for Donna Haraway and the pronatalists down her street to encounter pigeons than one another.) Weil says that “the past offers us a partially completed discrimination”—an odd phrase, but a vital one. She means that the events and the persons of the past are relatively fully shaped—not totally complete, because the consequences of the past live on in the present, but partially so, complete enough that we can step back and take an appraising look, rather as a painter does when she’s almost finished with her canvas. We do not have the same intensity of involvement in the past that we do in the present, and it’s precisely that which makes the past useful to us: “Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past.”
Let me try to illustrate what I think Weil means. One of the most beautiful novels I know is Clear Light of Day (1980), by the Indian writer Anita Desai. The story concerns the four siblings of the Das family, who live in Old Delhi, and how their lives change from the 1940s to the 1970s. Certain complex familial dynamics tend to pull them apart, to set them at odds with one another, but all of their tensions are dramatically exacerbated by the independence and subsequent partition of India in 1947. In addition to the tensions felt by all in that time and place, the Dases must deal with the uncomfortable fact that the man from whom they rent their house, Hyder Ali, is Muslim—and the family’s older brother, Raja, is drawn more and more deeply into Muslim culture and the Urdu language (which he considers aesthetically superior to his family’s native Hindi). When, during partition, Muslims are leaving India and Hindus are leaving the newly created state of Pakistan, and new outbreaks of violence between the groups occur every day, Raja’s inclinations are fraught with strain and stress for himself and his family.
Raja eventually escapes Old Delhi, as does his sister Tara, who marries a diplomat and so lives largely overseas. The other sister, Bimla, is therefore left at home to care for her autistic brother, Baba, and watch over the gradual deterioration of their house, their neighborhood, their city—and the family that the Dases once were. As the novel progresses her bitterness grows and grows, until it generates a crisis that I will not describe here, because I very much want you to read the novel.
But here comes a spoiler I cannot avoid. At one point in the story Bim finds that she cannot sleep, and takes a book, at random, from her bookcase. It is the Life of Aurangzeb—the last great Mughal (and therefore Muslim) emperor of India. When the emperor knew he was dying, he dictated a letter to a close friend in which he wrote, “Now I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness, but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!”
Aurangzeb was not an indulgent or permissive monarch. His persecution of not just non-Muslims but also Muslims who understood their faith differently than he did created much anger against him, and he spent too many years of his long rule putting down rebellions for which his own intolerance was largely responsible. Given how much of her own life has been shaped, and not for good, by conflicts with Muslims, Bim might not be thought the ideal reader of his story. And yet, once she has read the words I just quoted, Desai tells us this: “Bim’s mind seemed stilled at last.” In absolute calm Bim realizes that she too carries a stupendous caravan of sin, one that she greatly desires to empty, as best she can.
It is the hand of time, I think, that smooths over the differences, that allows Bim to set aside all that might separate her from this Mughal emperor. She probably could have drawn no nourishment from the letters of her landlord Hyder Ali, even if they had been equally eloquent. But the buffer of the centuries enables her to see Aurangzeb as, simply, an old man who looked back over a long life with no satisfaction and much shame; and therefore to see him as someone worthy of her sympathy—someone in whose very shoes she could imagine herself. And this imaginative participation across the gap of years, of religion, of sex, settles her restless mind because it enables her to see her own situation with a clarity that’s all the more powerful because it was unlooked-for.
Later on, when Bim meets with her sister Tara, she makes an apology that Tara brushes away—“it was all so long ago.” To which Bim replies that, even so, “it’s never over. Nothing’s over, ever.” And this is both a blessing and a curse. The past that ties us to people in ways that hurt us also ties us to people in ways that make healing possible. Sometimes we wish that the past could be over; sometimes we are grateful that it is not. It stands in the middle, “partially completed” but not over, poised between radical otherness and utter likeness. And that is why, as Weil says, “Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past.” We can see what really matters—“the eternal,” what always matters—because of that middle distance.
When we look to the past, Weil believes, what we are always looking for is whatever “is better than we are.” Some of us tend to look toward the future for what is better, but Weil thinks that “what is better than we are cannot be found in the future.” The reason is simply that the future does not exist. “The future is empty and is filled by our imagination. Our imagination can only picture a perfection on our own scale. It is just as imperfect as we are; it does not surpass us by a single hair’s breadth.” This brings to mind the old line about the great limitation of travel: Wherever you go, there you are. The future cannot teach us because we are the ones who must imagine it.
In 1996 a group of people including the musician Brian Eno, the computer scientist Danny Hillis, and the visionary Stewart Brand started the Long Now Foundation for the purpose of encouraging people to look toward the distant future. Says the foundation’s website: “The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” As Eno has written, “If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable—gauche, uncivilised—to act in disregard of our descendants.” Amen to that, and amen again. But if Weil is right, our ability to think toward the future is limited by our deficient imaginations, and therefore we need the witness of the past. 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.
Weil believes that for those who wish to encounter the eternal, to find something better than ourselves, writings from the past are useful because “the mere passing of time effects a certain separation between what is eternal and what is not”; which is her reason for saying, as earlier noted, Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past as in the present.” And, she adds, especially useful to us is “the past which is temporally so dead that it offers no food for our passions.”
This is why Bim could draw nourishment from the dying words of Aurangzeb, and why, I believe, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Weil wrote an essay about the Iliad—one of the most famous, and indeed one of the most powerful, things ever written about Homer’s great poem.
Weil reads the Iliad as someone who is preoccupied, indeed obsessed, by what she calls “force”: “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” She is watching force sweep across Europe, driving people—including Weil’s parents, who escaped Paris, and then France itself, ending up spending the war in New York—out of their homes, and turning millions of them into the final “thing”: a corpse. It is this horrible transformation of living persons into things that “the Iliad never tires of showing us.”
For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.
But why look so far into the past for this revelatory mirror? The First World War had destroyed many of the young men of Europe just twenty years earlier, and had produced a great outpouring of fiction and poetry and memoir. Why not read those books?
Indeed, many of those books are worth reading; some of them are masterpieces. But, in a strange sense, their very ability to engage the emotions of readers in 1940 limits their revelatory power. Many readers of Weil’s time remembered the Great War (as they called it); their fathers or brothers or lovers or sons fought in it, and often enough died. Stories about that war could show to the readers of 1940 some of the peculiar horrors of their century; but what they could not show, not in the way that the Iliad does, is the cold, terrible fact that force lies, “today as yesterday, at the very center of human history.” When Andromache pleads with Hector not to return to the fighting, when Achilles weeps and rages over the death of his beloved friend Patroclus, when old King Priam goes to his knees to beg his son’s killer for his son’s body, a powerful electrical current leaps across the millennia, from that distant pole to our immediate one. Such a strange world, such an alien world; yet its occupants, too, know the implacable rule of force. Something terrible links, without erasing the differences between, the heights of ancient Troy and the cold beaches of Normandy. That linkage illuminates, reveals, the strange continuities of history, but only by keeping otherness before us as well. That is what makes the Iliad “the loveliest of mirrors.”