Temporal bandwidth – the width of your present
“I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.”
“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.”
Reading old books for the accumulation of personal density
“The future can not reach us because *we* are the ones who must imagine it.”
“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.”
“Isn’t this strange mixture of vices and virtues, foolishness and wisdom, blindness and insight, simply the human condition?”
Informational triage – our cognitive limitations mean we can’t think about or form beliefs about everything; can’t judge ancestors
John Dewey: “It seems almost incredible to us, for example, that things which we know very well, could have escaped recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners for minors and by assuming superior native intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other things.”
Positive selection vs. negative selection
“If it is foolish to think that we can carry with us all the good things from the past—from our personal past or that of our culture—while leaving behind all the unwanted baggage, it is a counsel of despair and, I think, another kind of foolishness to think that if we leave behind the errors and miseries of the past, we must also leave behind everything that gave the world its savor.”
Chesterton: “The mind of man is at its largest, and especially at its broadest, when it feels the brotherhood of humanity linking it up with remote and primitive and even barbaric things.“
Old books as a friend: want addition of development or pushback, not just agreement
John Dewey’s definition of education: “Reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.”
“Breaking bread with the dead is not a scholarly task to be completed but a permanent banquet, to which all who hunger are invited.“
Genesis story of Jacob wrestling with figure: “I will not let you go until you bless me”
Temporal bandwidth to increase personal density
Distance and difference
The Big Here and Long Now—how distance in time and space don’t stop people from being affected by others’ work
Frederick Douglass’ “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” speech a model of “negotiating with the past in a way that gives charity and honesty equal weight”
Francis Spufford: “You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.”
Need for a disposition to love
“What I counsel is to give the dead the blood of our attention for our own sake, to enrich and strengthen our identities, to make ourselves more solid and less tenuous—and then… to use the solidity we have gained to help us make meaningful promises to the future.”
“We cannot use the past to love ourselves unless we also learn to love our ancestors. We must see them not as others but as neighbors—and then, ultimately, as kin.”
“The argument that I have made here for the cultivation of personal density is also an argument for serving as links in the living chain that extends into the distant past and also into the distant future. It is an argument for a genealogy of love.”