An old man in an Italian farmhouse muses to his friend: “What brings tranquility? What makes you care less?”
Two thousand years later, fifteen people sitting in an air conditioned classroom in central Texas, strangers to the old man and his world, realize his question is more relevant than ever.
The professor in that Texas classroom was Alan Jacobs, whose Breaking Bread with the Dead uses this anecdote about the musings of the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC) and his Baylor University students as the jumping off point for a literate and humane exploration of the necessity and difficulty of engaging with the ideas and people of the past.
Informed by the work of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, Jacobs starts not with an answer to Horace’s question but with two perceptions that create a formidable barrier to tranquility today: information overload and social acceleration.
Information overload, “we are always receiving more data than we are able to evaluate,” forces us to triage our attention every day. “To avoid madness we must learn to reject appeals to our time, and reject them without hesitation or pity.”
Social acceleration, “the world is not only changing but changing faster and faster,” fosters the seemingly contradictory feeling that everything is moving too fast but at the same time we are trapped in social structures and life patterns, deprived of meaningful choice. “You can’t stop playing the game, but the rules keep changing without warning.”
Relatedly, there is an “increasing sense not just that the past is sadly in error, is superannuated and irrelevant and full of ideas that we’re well rid of, but that it actually defiles us—its presence makes us unclean.” This belief in defilement undermines what we need most to find tranquility amid the forces of information overload and social acceleration: “personal density” and “temporal bandwidth.” These are terms Jacobs borrows from Gravity’s Rainbow, the 1973 Thomas Pynchon novel.
Temporal bandwidth is the width of your perspective or vision; your ability to dwell in both the past and the future. And the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your personal density, your sense of personal weight or depth. Personal density is, in Jacobs’s view, a mental anchor that keeps you from being blown away in the winds of information overload and social acceleration. It buffers you from the “tyranny of everyday anxieties” that flow from the “frenetic standstill,” the constant connectivity of the now.
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