“She’s dead. Let’s talk about someone alive, for goodness’ sake,” Mildred complained. It was a rainy afternoon, the perfect time to lose herself in the giant television, but her husband Montag had insisted they waste time reading books. On top of that, he was ruining the mood with musings about a deceased neighbor.
This scene from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 captures the spirit of our technological age—the obsession with the current, the immediate, the present. Mildred doesn’t understand being hung up on the past. Many of us don’t either:
Why read Austen? She’s dead. Dante? He’s dead. Brontë? Take your pick—they’re all dead, too! Let’s talk about someone alive, for goodness’ sake!
Technology, as one of Bradbury’s characters explains, asks nothing of us: “It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in.” Audio and visual media wow us into a passive silence, bombarding the senses with irresistible stimulation. It is imminently—intensely—present.
Modern media is monological, but books invite you into a conversation.
When you open a book, you can actually dialogue—with the dead. It’s a discussion that progresses exactly at your pace. A book is a partner that waits patiently: “You can shut them, say, ‘Hold on a moment,’” as Fahrenheit’s Faber explains.
“Who has time for the dead?!” our progressive society retorts. But the dead have all the time in the world—plenty of time for anyone willing to crack their covers.
In the cupboard above the oven we keep the most treasured pieces of the family library: our cookbooks. While our favorite volumes can be identified by their spattered exteriors and broken spines, one edition holds a special place: the Fox Family Cookbook.
It was Grandma Fox’s tradition to give an orderly notebook of her recipes to each granddaughter on her wedding day. She keyed all of her recipes on a typewriter, sometimes with a comment or two about who in the family loved the dish or what holiday it went with.
These days, many of us mostly cook from our phones using one-off recipes we googled 30 seconds ago. Who knows who wrote them and who cares? We will forget them next week anyways. We just need something for tonight. But what if we managed to slow down for a minute and escape the urgency of the present?
We need to make space in our kitchens for books—family cookbooks, in particular. Food can become more than the next meal; it can become tradition. Supper can become communion when we welcome the dead to our table.
Recipes passed down through generations are a way to trace sustaining grace. We inherit them as a testimony, and we cook them as a proclamation of unwavering hope: Though some of us have passed on to the Lord’s eternal table, one day we will share meals together again (Luke 12:37).