The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [56]
THE CLOISTER WALK
ACEDIA
From Late Latin, from Greek akedia, indifference.
a (absence) + kedos (care)
—AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY
The malice of sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty (though
that can be a symptom of it) but in the refusal of joy. It is allied
to despair.
—Evelyn Waugh, Acedia, in THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
Amma Syncletica said: There is a grief that is useful, and there is
a grief that is destructive. The first sort consists in weeping over one’s
own faults and weeping over the weakness of one’s neighbors, in
order not to lose one’s purpose, and attach oneself to the perfect good.
But there is also a grief that comes from the enemy, full of mockery,
which some call accidie. This spirit must be cast out, mainly by
prayer and psalmody.
—THE SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS
Severe lethargy has set in, what the desert monks might have called “acedia” or “listlessness,” and in the Middle Ages was considered sloth, but these days is most often termed “depression.” I had thought that I was merely tired and in need of rest at year’s end, but it drags on, becoming the death-in-life that I know all too well, when my capacity for joy shrivels up and, like drought-stricken grass, I die down to the roots to wait it out. The simplest acts demand a herculean effort, the pleasure I normally take in people and the world itself is lost to me. I can be with people I love, and know that I love them, but feel nothing at all. I am observing my life more than living it.
I recognize in all of this the siege of what the desert monks termed the “noonday demon.” It suggests that whatever I’m doing, indeed my entire life of “doings,” is not only meaningless but utterly useless. This plunge into the chill waters of pure realism is incapacitating, and the demon likes me this way. It suggests sleep when what I need most is to take a walk. It insists that I shut myself away when what I probably need is to be with other people. It mocks the rituals, routines, and work that normally fill my day; why do them, why do anything at all, it says, in the face of so vast an emptiness. Worst of all, even though I know that the ancient remedies—prayer, psalmody, scripture reading—would help to pull me out of the morass, I find myself incapable of acting on this knowledge. The exhaustion that I’m convinced lies behind most suicides finds its seed in acedia; the rhythms of daily life, and of the universe itself, the everyday glory of sunrise and sunset and all the “present moments” in between seem a disgusting repetition that stretches on forever. It would be all too easy to feel that one wants no part of it any more.
The first experience of acedia that I recall (although I did not know to name it as such) occurred when I was fifteen years old, a scholarship student at a prep school in Honolulu. The job I held in partial payment of my scholarship was a pleasant one; during the noon hour, I answered the phone and did secretarial work at the Music School. Not being in the school cafeteria gave me a chance to diet, and my normal fare, in what now strikes me as a comical parody of the monastic desert, was a model of severity: Metrecal wafers, a low-cal soda, and an apple or an orange. (For readers who have never tasted Metrecal, allow me to suggest fresh asphalt with a hint of chocolate and the bitter afterglow of saccharin.) One day as I was unpacking my lunch, a lunch that my mother had faithfully packed for me, I suddenly saw the future stretch out before me: days and days of lunches that one day my mother would not be packing for me, that I would be responsible for myself. Day upon day of eating and excreting, of working at this job or that, of monotony, the futile round.
When, in my thirties, I encountered the monk Evagrius’s classic description of the “noonday demon,” I recognized