Alan Jacobs
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind
In his book Jacobs offers a reading of Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”
Here are two extracts from Jacobs’s book that would make good headings for a future copybook:
Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.
Breaking bread with the dead is not a scholarly task to be completed but a permanent banquet, to which all who hunger are invited.
Perhaps not enough to satiate a monstrous banquet-hunger but surely enough to furnish the fixings for a good picnic for those with frugal discernment.
And so for day 2849
30.09.2014