Kathleen Norris’s session at the Festival of Faith & Writing offered some good stuff, though my notes are spotty.
She spent most of the time defining that word, “acedia,” that has fallen out of usage. She’s trying to resurrect it, because she thinks it captures our current culture’s general boredom, apathy, or ennui. None of those words expresses the attitude and mood quite right, so she’s returning to acedia.
She wrote in the description:
Few people today have encountered the word acedia, which literally means not-caring, or being unable to care that you don’t care. In some ways, though, acedia defines today’s culture, expressing itself as willful indifference, restless boredom, or even frantic busyness. Norris discusses both acedia and its opposite–the zeal that draws on faith, hope, and love.
She said that when the seven deadly sins were determined and defined, the term “acedia,” which had been used widely among monks who struggled with it, was absorbed into the concept of sloth. It was lost. It has a meaning, however, that is specific and in her opinion, useful.
“I tend to believe words are in usage because we need them,” she said. And she thinks we need the word “acedia” again. When she proposed the idea of a book about acedia, somebody–maybe a monk, maybe an editor–told her, “Well, you’ve got an open field, since not much has been done with it since the sixth century.”
She said she faced an “attack of thoughts spiraling me downward” and made a “powerful connection with my past. When you’re a writer,” she said, “there’s no turning back from such a connection.”
“Acedia works like a spiritual morphine. It leaves you not caring; unable to commit to relationships; unable to stay in one place; and so frantically busy, you don’t have the energy to care….there’s so much coming at you, you can’t care any more. It renders us impervious to care.”
Does that sound like our culture today?
By the way, she passed along what she thought was the best description of midlife she’d ever heard (I can’t remember the source):
“Midlife is a metamorphosis in reverse, where you start out as a butterfly and gradually turn into a caterpillar.”(laughter)
She talks and writes openly of her avoidance of all things math-related. In a room full of writers, I’m sure there were plenty of sympathetic ears. When she said, “I don’t have much faith in linear process,” she was rewarded with a burst of hearty laughter. I have no idea what came before or after that. No context. Only that isolated statement.
She talked about how our culture gives us the art we need and maybe the art we want.
Maybe we want Britney, for example, because we don’t want to deal with the complicated pain and horror of that pesky ground combat in Iraq. “Denial,” she said, “is entrenched in our culture. We don’t want to be awakened from our sleep of acedia.”
Maybe we want to not care; in fact, we might even want to not care that we don’t care.
“Why bother?” we wonder.
She borrowed a phrase from Wordsworth, that we’re in a state of almost “savage torpor.”
Life bores us. And she quoted someone…Baudelaire, I think, saying, “Oh, how tired I am of the need to live 24 hours a day.”
She was speaking to a lot of writers in that room. She talked about the “tyranny of the blank page.” Later she called it the “democracy of the white page–every writer has to return there.”
I would add that bloggers can replace that with “blank screen.” The screen stares. The template taunts. Do we have anything to say? Each writer returns there and asks the same thing…unless, of course, she is plagued by acedia.
“What do writers need?” she asked rhetorically. “Not to stop.”
“We need ‘possibility,'” she said, then quoting Kierkegaard so quickly that I couldn’t get it down. So I jotted a few key words in order to Google it later, which I did, landing on this page of Kierkegaard quotes:
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!“
She claims that prayer and the reciting of psalms battle acedia.
Finally, she mentioned in passing a “Commonplace Book.”
Do you keep a Commonplace Book?
I think my blog has become something of an online, virtual Commonplace Book; in fact, I think many blogs are, given the description provided at Wikipedia. It says:
They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.
This very post, in fact, is an act of “commonplacing,” as I record Norris’s quotations and reflect on them personally:
What is “Commonplacing” and what is a Commonplace Book? Commonplacing is the act of selecting important phrases, lines, and/or passages from texts and writing them down; the commonplace book is the notebook in which a reader has collected quotations from works s/he has read. Commonplace books can also include comments and notes from the reader; they are frequently indexed so that the reader can classify important themes and locate quotations related to particular topics or authors.
The commonplace book was always at hand as a conversational prompt…today, perhaps, it can serve as fodder for blog posts, articles, books, or good old-fashioned conversations.
Although I don’t want to add another notebook to my life, juggling it along with my Day-Timer and journal, I’m tempted to begin one for that purpose–to collect sayings and quotations that I can use as a conversational (or blog-versational) prompt. And then the blog itself serves as a more developed, refined version of the notebook.
That’s all I’ve got for Kathleen Norris.
Look for signs of acedia.
And tell me about what you use as a kind of Commonplace Book.
Is it your blog?
Do you weave quotes and facts into your journal or diary?
Do you jot down quotes on pieces of paper or 3X5 cards and toss them in a box?
Lynn says
I love the idea of a commonplace book. I didn’t know that’s what I had; I bought a book in the 70s called “The Nothing Book,” nothing but blank pages, back before I’d ever heard of a “journal.” My Nothing Book is sprinkled with lists of books I’ve read (by year), lists of books and authors I’d LIKE to read (based on recommendations), a few jokes and tips, and sentences or paragraphs from other people’s writing that I think are especially beautiful. I don’t use my Nothing Book for writing projects, it’s just a personal place to keep stuff that interests me, and now it serves as a kind of time capsule of different periods of my life. I even have a list of “possible baby names” composed many years ago; I can now see that I always did like the names that now belong to my two college-aged sons 🙂
Thanks for this post, Ann. Like all of yours, it gives me much to ponder.
nancy says
dwelling on the knowledge of belonging to God
leads to endless possibilities ~ nancy
Monica- Paper Bridges says
yes, that’s my blog. stuff I want to remember, thoughts I think are helpful to others. I do the notebook thing too. journal.
but I want to hear more about your writing project. I think I know what it’s about. email me if you want to vent. I promise not to blog about it 🙂
and I got your envelope. the sign is off to my left, a lovely reminder of you.
Ann @ Holy Experience says
Yes, I have a Word File where I keep quotes, snippets and thoughts– a gathering place. And then a private blog where I collect things I want to revisit. Having these thoughts in a computer file allows for easy searching with keywords. And yet, I still like jotting, scribbling, scrawling in a journal.
Much to mull on here, Ann…
My thanks…
Danielle says
My bookmark toolbar on my web browser is my Commonplace Book. I have tabs full of little tidbits of websites or blogs that I find interesting. Projects I want to try, paintings I love (I’m an artist), and shops full of great gift ideas for loved-ones. They serve as inspiration and also to remind me of who I AM on the days when I seem to really need the refresher.
Thanks for your notes on Kathleen. She was on the radio this weekend, and just about blew me away. Right in the middle of my very own year-long Acedia attack.
Ramona says
I discovered your blog through a search for Kathleen’s new book Acedia. The reason I was searching for it, was so I could blog about it. I received a notice that it had arrived at my local library and it is waiting for me to pick it up. I ordered it because all of sudden several different people mentioned the book and I am fascinated by the concept.
I am very glad to have found your blog and will continue to read.
Ann says
My common place book resides beside me right now. It contains all those insightful things that I know won’t return unless I capture them at the moment they come into consciousness. It makes a lot of sense even if one does not suffer from the dread acedia. Norris makes a comfortable bridge from the ancient writing of monks to our present day. But some of what she says seems too broad. That depression may mask acedia. I don’t know that she is wrong it is just that it seems unfounded.
One of my friends has three college graduate sons who in their 30’s have not yet “found themselves”. They work at what their Father terms casual labor. Unmarried, uncoupled and no direction in their life. He laments that there are so many options that his children just can’t decide what to do with their lives. I am childless and hence no expert but I think these boys lack the rules for deciding what to do. Religion was not part of their upbringing. Rules offer an emotional basis for deciding to pursue one thing over another. Norris took the hard road to figure that out for herself. Religion in her early life was abandoned to secular pursuits which including lesbianism and finally her monastic-like move to South Dakota where the spiritual life became her refuge. I am grateful to follow her intellectual quest for sanity. By whatever means she achieves it she is a good writer, a good thinker and a long suffer. Ann
Jane says
Acedia is Me
Eight years ago, I was having a spiritual crisis. My counsellor, a trained Catholic nun, rescued me, providing reading material that included Norris’ Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace and psalms. Kathleen rescued me.
Now, first time in my life, I am being treated for depression. Although I can continue work as a designer — I stopped caring, and didn’t care that I didn’t care. Whammy — LA Times review of Acedia and Me which I am now reading, having finished The Quotidian Mysteries — Laundry, Liturgy and Women’s Work.
Being Catholic, I recognize, even though 68, that the not caring is SLOTH.
(It’s a sin!). Besides prayer and psalms, Kathleen talks about the importance of “routines” — the very thing my acedia eschews.
I don’t have a common place book — I have evergrowing PILES OF PAPERS AND MAGAZINES which I keep for spiritual and artistic inspiration — which I ignore — once a devoted gardener, I just watch my plants wilt and die. We won’t discuss my once beautiful home.
Today I decided I needed to keep an ACEDIA JOURNAL. — I will list my daily “routine” accomplishments — one “pile” demolished today, three loads of laundry, a clean countertop and one cleaned drawer in my bathroom. And I will read psalms in bed — it makes a difference, although I do not do it daily.
There is definitely a difference between depression, greatly alleviated by medication — and Acedia which leaves me turning my back on everything except reading and the internet — I found you searching for an acedia support group. I will bookmark you, thank you so much
lorraine bagaus says
Does Kathleen Norris still live in Lemmon, SD? Does she have an e-mail address?
Nuala says
I also found your blog when looking up th emeaning of acedia. Its a fascinating word and I agree with Kathleen when she says we need that word to describe the present malaise in society. Thank you ann for your account of Kathleen’s talk.
Jeannelle says
Count me in as one who stumbled onto your blog while searching “kathleen norris acedia”. I recently read “The Cloister Walk” and am now in “Dakota”. I’m about to call the library to order “Acedia and Me”. Such refreshing insights in these books. I live in a rural community and much of what Norris writes in “Dakota” is really hitting home.
Thank you for your fine post!
Cody Clark says
You complete so many connections in my head. I just got out of a bible study over this Sunday’s readings contemplating about manna in the desert and how Jesus is the “bread of life” and how that’s a daily thing and how I often resent and resist dailiness… I was reminded of my little dogeared book by Kathleen Norris called the Quotidian Mysteries. I looked up “kathleen norris acedia” and found your blog. What a blessing.
You comment about Sloth and Britney reminded me of two things — a short article in Relevant that defines sloth as a “zeal for the trivial” and how it’s an epidemic that afflicts the young. And then I thought of the prophetic words of Neal Postman in his preface to “Amusing Ourselves To Death”
I love the feeling when I read something that makes my neurons snap into a new arrangement, like a seed crystal that causes learning to fall out of the supersaturated solution of information in my brain.
Missy says
Today on CBC’s Tapestry, I heard of an affliction that I have felt many times in my 20’s and 30’s but never knew what the feeling was. Today I heard the term Acedia and WHAM that is it…I am now 50 and after being treated and still on medication I do not suffer from acedia (depression, which is different but can be a symptom…long term…I think) anymore….I love day to day routines…except dishes…I do not have a dishwasher but I do have a 14 year old son!!! I walk my dog everyday and enjoy the blue skies, rabbits running from my dog, the finches flying around and the wind just blowing….in my past I have felt tired of life and thought when does it end….I will never think of that again…life is precious….I read I care I support what I can. A past ‘friend’ commented as to why bother supporting charities…all the money and food and airdrops haven’t made a difference…but before I even heard of Acedia I replied as long as one child, woman, man, family benefits from my donation it matters and that is the conclusion I felt listening to Kathleen Norris today….thank you Ann for your blog….
Liz Dafoe says
Magnificent site. Plenty of useful info here. I am sending it to a few friends and also sharing on delicious. Thanks for your effort and the information
aggiesgrannies.co.uk/wp-content/sitemap.xml says
http://aggiesgrannies.co.uk