Review by New York Times Review
BY the end of Christianity's sixth century, the fathers of the Church had revised a list of "eight bad thoughts" into what we now recognize as the seven deadly sins, having dropped the most slippery among the eight - acedia - perhaps because of its tendency, as "a paralysis of soul," to pervade and abet all the rest. When Kathleen Norris, whose previous works of nonfiction, especially "The Cloister Walk," have made her an authority on matters of the spirit, told an Anglican nun she planned to write a book about acedia, the nun "cautioned" that Norris had "taken on the devil himself." The author "laughed uneasily but was too full of literary ambitions to dwell on what she meant." Could that be what's wrong with "Acedia & Me"? The devil? Imagine Screwtape, the high-ranking demon of C.S. Lewis's "Screwtape Letters," directing his protégé, Wormwood, to seek out a successful writer of Christian inspiration, perch invisibly on her desk and present a ticklish semantic problem as a matter of vice mistaken for illness. The author is a bluestocking, with a weakness for etymology and archaic religious texts, her body of work lauded for revealing the sacred in the ordinary. What's more, she has suffered from depression, an ailment easy to mistake for acedia, the two - if they are in fact two and not one - about as separable as conjoined twins who share a single heart. Think back, Wormwood whispers to this author. Remember yourself in high school, miserable, alienated, your mood "bleak," filled with "helplessness, self-pity and terror." That wasn't evidence of a vulnerability to depression; that was the beginning of your sinful tendency to turn away from the love of God. You find yourself insensible, at times, to joy, to love? You're too exhausted to get off the couch, and want nothing more than to sleep? If those aren't moral failures, what are? Kathleen, you know how to recognize as sin what millions of mortals confuse with affliction! You can tell them what's really wrong, not only with them, but also with the modern world. Collective acedia! Industrial acedia! Social acedia! Why not, Wormwood suggests, devote a whole book to the subject? You included it in "The Cloister Walk." But a few measly pages? That's barely scraping the surface. And don't forget how well read you are. You can summon hundreds - hundreds! - of authors to shore up your ideas. Dante. Pascal. St. Ignatius of Loyola. John Donne. Chaucer. Seneca. Coleridge. Kierkegaard. Baudelaire. Chekhov. Joyce. Albee. Joseph Brodsky. F. Scott Fitzgerald. John Berryman. Flannery O'Connor. Graham Greene. W.H. Auden. Kafka. Evelyn Waugh. Aldous Huxley. Karl Menninger. Thomas Merton. William Styron. And that's just off the top of my - I mean your - head. Heavens, you could have three or more citations per page! Early in "Acedia & Me," Norris announces her intent: to try to understand acedia in all its aspects, with the particular purpose of drawing a distinction between it and depression. She admits acedia bears many of the hallmarks of that illness - an inability to take pleasure in anything or "to address the body's basic daily needs"; a loss of interest in previously enjoyable tasks or recreation; a lack of energy, focus and feeling; a failure to care even whether one lives or dies - but calls acedia a vice best countered by self-discipline. Depression she defines as having "an identifiable and external cause," a response to "grievous loss." This, she says, is what makes it different from acedia, which arises "out of nowhere." If her assertion sounds suspect, maybe that's because it's incorrect. Loss precipitates grief, anguish, even despair, emotions appropriate to their cause. Depression is brain chemistry gone awry and results in an inability to feel anything at all as often as it does sadness. Too, it does arrive seemingly "out of nowhere." The guilt that accompanies depression proceeds from its lack of apparent cause. The depressed person asks himself how he can feel so wretched when nothing is wrong. His family and friends love him; he has a great job that pays well, a beautiful home. So why is he unable to summon interest in anything? Why does he feel worthless, not deserving the trouble it would take to save him? Why does he wish he were dead? As an infant, Kathleen Norris was critically ill, her life saved by an experimental treatment. In middle age, she imagines this near-death experience afforded her a glimpse of heaven - the familiar "tunnel of light" - before she was "tossed back into this painful, messy and uncertain thing called life." Forced into a premature awareness of death, "set on a quirky and lonely" pilgrimage, the "dejected" writer developed a lifelong tendency to acedia. The catalyst for her first experience of soul-sickness was her awareness, as a teenager, that her mother would die someday and cease to care for her. In her adult years she lost a close friend to ovarian cancer. While writing "Acedia & Me," her father and husband were dying, and her sister was gravely ill. In fact, the many health crises and the eventual death of Norris's husband provide the book's narrative drive, or stroll, as it meanders through thickets of homily, pious speculation and quotations. BEING held hostage by one death after another explains why Norris finds so much wrong with herself and society. But in "The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker more convincingly reveals these discontents as proceeding from our terror of mortality. Consumerism, hedonism, a hunger for novelty, an obsession with celebrity, the pursuit of more (and more varied) entertainments: Norris ascribes such phenomena to a universal plague of acedia. But how do our frantic quest for self-enhancement over social justice and our insistence on endless distractions prove an apathy so deep we can't care about anything? Isn't it more likely they serve, as Becker suggests, a "vital lie" of human character, the one that protects us from the inevitability of death? "Depression has many causes," Norris observes. "Can we agree that there are many treatments as well?" Absolutely. To relieve despair her late husband chose psychotherapy. To combat what she calls the vice of acedia, Norris armed herself with religion. She challenges her readers to be self-aware, conscious of their behavior and of how it both reveals and affects their souls. Who could take exception to this? But to project her self-diagnosis onto the rest of humanity is ill-considered, placing her in the company of those "judging people who are ill as being morally deficient." "Loss and death are worthless from a secular perspective," Norris asserts, a perplexing if not offensive statement, and one that should disturb the devout as well as the atheist. If mortality inspires fear, it also provides meaning. Without the promise of eternal life, isn't there greater impetus to care - to cherish the days we are given and the people we love and will lose? Norris challenges readers to be self-aware, conscious of their behavior and of how it reveals and affects their souls. Kathryn Harrison's most recent book is "While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The lacuna in Norris' published life, following the phenomenal impact of The Cloister Walk (1996) and Amazing Grace (1998), was due, she now reveals, to the death of her husband, and to acedia, a profound form of apathy. Akin to depression, acedia, or the noonday demon, was counted among the original eight bad thoughts, but the term fell out of use. Norris believes it's time to reclaim it. Delving, as she loves to do, into early Christian texts, and illuminating the wisdom of the monastic tradition, Norris, a superb storyteller, careful synthesizer, and brilliant interpreter, presents the peculiar history of acedia and chronicles her own battles with this particular soul-sickness. Her personal stories are truly moving and instructive, but the most arresting and resonant aspect of this engrossing extrapolation is Norris' theory of social acedia as the explanation of our inaction in the face of so much violence and injustice. We abhor bloodshed, prejudice, and greed yet feel powerless to stop them. Norris' fascinating inquiry casts our predicament in a new light and maps a course out of this enervating despair. Reading this strongly argued, paradigm-altering work may be the first strike against the demon it portrays.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Norris's magnificent spiritual memoir of acedia (a complex cousin of depression) gets an uneven audio treatment. At times, Norris's straightforward and monotonous delivery doesn't do justice to the aching beauty of her prose. However, there is a powerful simplicity to having Norris relate her own story, especially since even the most dramatic sequences--such as when her husband disappeared and planned to kill himself--are rendered without the overwrought Sturm und Drang that other narrators might attempt. Her performance is generally dispassionate, her most animated moments not when she is describing her own spiritual journey but when she incisively critiques the narcissism of American culture. The final disc contains a PDF of Norris's "commonplace book" of favorite quotations on acedia, ranging from early church sages like Anthony the Great and Norris's beloved Evagrius to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ian Fleming. A Riverhead hardcover (Reviews, June 9). (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Here, nationally best-selling poet Norris (Little Girls in Church) offers a difficult and intimate, almost naked look at the spiritual state of acedia that may be foreign to lay audiences. Though they may find parallels in their own relationships and/or careers as they listen to Norris probe her husband's and her own slide into this specialized relative of depression, it isn't an easy journey in audio format, as the book requires pauses for reflection and relistenings of certain sections to appreciate and grasp her concepts fully. Norris also uses this forum to address a spiritual void in our culture but ultimately suggests religious healing as the best antidote. Recommended for select audiences of scholars and philosophers. [Audio clip available through us.penguingroup.com; the Riverhead hc was recommended "for religious libraries," LJ 9/1/08.--Ed.]--Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Memoir of a spiritual writer and poet who discovered relevance to her life and work in the longforgotten and difficult-to-define concept of acedia. When Norris (The Virgin of Bennington, 2001, etc.) first encountered the word "acedia" in the writings of a fourth-century monk, Evagrius Ponticus, she instantly recognized it as an apt description of her spiritual malaise. Here she struggles to pin down the meaning, naming its components as apathy, boredom, enervating despair, restlessness and the absence of caring. She also attempts, not entirely satisfactorily, to distinguish this spiritual state from the psychological state of depression, which her husband, fellow poet David Dwyer, experienced. She explores acedia's etymology and her personal history with it, sharing stories from her childhood, adolescence and long, crisis-plagued marriage. As a teenager, she responded by keeping busy, reading Kierkegaard's thoughts on despair and writing prodigiously. As a young adult, having lost the religious moorings of her upbringing, she found that John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress awakened in her a renewed sense of conscience. Years later, as she became her husband's full-time caregiver, acedia, which had never been totally absent from her spiritual life, renewed its grip on her, and with it, a temptation to doubt. Her attraction to monastic prayer and her strong interest in the monastic life--examined in her books Dakota (1993) and The Cloister Walk (1996)--is evident here in the numerous references to the writings of early monks and to conversations with Benedictines at the monastery near her home, where she is an oblate. In the final chapter, "Acedia: A Commonplace Book," Norris presents dozens of quotations on the subject, demonstrating convincingly that soul weariness has been a persistent and troubling phenomenon throughout recorded history. Surprisingly frank and moving. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
