Give and Take

Episode 243: Breaking Bread With The Dead, with Alan Jacobs



September 23rd, 2020  •  50 mins 49 secs  •  Download (46.5 MB)  •  Link with Timestamp

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My guest is Alan Jacobs. His newest book is "Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind." W. H. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present--and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our "personal density."