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147 of 153 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wise and bookish exploration of a concept., August 28, 2008
This review is from: Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life (Hardcover)
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This is a thoughtful memoir, full of incisive literary quotes from the author's wide reading. You may not be acquainted with the term acedia, but surely you are familiar with its many symptoms, offshoots, and corollaries: among them, lethargy, apathy, paralysis, depression, and alienation. The author tells the story of her marriage, of her husband's illness and death. Each chapter is a meditation, an essay on the author's search for clarity and meaning. Kathleen Norris is also the author of AMAZING GRACE: A VOCABULARY OF FAITH. She is at her best when defining concepts, especially religious concepts. In ACEDIA & ME: A MARRIAGE, MONKS, AND A WRITER'S LIFE, she concentrates on the concept of acedia and you will be supprised to learn how common it is. She looks at acedia as experienced, then as observed. Of course the author discusses Andrew Solomon's excellent study, THE NOONDAY DEMON, but she says that it is common to experience acedia without being clinically depressed. There are degrees of it, she says, respectable acedia and industrial acedia. The last section of the book is devoted to quotes touching on acedia from the wealth of our literature, Thomas Merton, Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, Ian Fleming, Walker Percy, and many, many others. I read every one of them and looked up from the book struck anew by the significance of the the author's theme. Those interested in reading more about intellectual acedia might want to start with Colin Wilson's THE OUTSIDER; those looking to read more on spiritual acedia might enjoy David Loy's take on it in LACK AND TRANSCENDENCE: THE PROBLEM OF DEATH AND LIFE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY, EXISTENTIALISM, AND BUDDHISM.
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73 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The temptation to acedia is an invitation to abandon involvement and leave the pangs of creativity to others.", September 14, 2008
This review is from: Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life (Hardcover)
In Chapter XV of ACEDIA & ME, Kathleen Norris assembles quotations from august personages in a "Commonplace Book" on the subject. The "temptation to acedia" quote is plucked from the trappist Michael Casey's book, FULLY HUMAN, FULLY DIVINE: AN INTERACTIVE CHRISTOLOGY. That excerpt begins just as sternly, "The vice of noninvolvement is said to be endemic in the Western world. The acediac is a person without commitment, who lives in a world characterized by mobility, passive entertainment, self-indulgence, and the effective denial of the validity of any external claim." That is quite an indictment and one that ought to be both conceded and argued: we are all susceptible to feeling, as Charles Baudelaire did, "weary...of this need to live twenty-four hours every day" but we also, in the course of living, experience productive and highly optimistic times. Nearly everyone's life is a mixture of ups and downs. Norris herself wrote the bestsellers THE CLOISTER WALK, and AMAZING GRACE. She also remained married to the same man, David J. Dwyer, until his death in 2003. So, Casey's definition of an acediac as someone who would leave creativity to others and who is without commitment seems too stringent to apply to her. Yet, Norris has written ACEDIA & ME because she recognizes in herself a stubborn tendency to sink into lethargy, boredom, detachment, apathy, and other facets of acedia. In a sense, this book is a form of therapy for her as she considers the subject from many perspectives. She consults the works of desert monks Anthony the Great and Evagrius. She compares and contrasts acedia and clinical depression and analyzes the psychological and psychiatric approaches to these related but not selfsame states of being. She also explores how acedia may affect us in the various stages of life, using chunks of her own autobiography as the prime example: "I have to resist the temptation to remain a spectator when I need to become involved. What I hate most about my own neuroses, and the foul mood of acedia that too frequently afflicts my soul, is how selfish they make me." An introspective and sensitive woman who has had her share of challenges and sorrows as well as successes and insulations, Norris admits as a young person she never expected to either marry or have children. Now, she is a widow who did not have children, and, in her seventh decade of life (she was born in 1947) she still fences with this persistent lack of desire to engage fully in life. She "pray[s], with the psalmist, 'Make us know the shortness of our life / that we may gain wisdom of heart.' " She adds, "I may feel lost and weary, but these words provide hope. If the life of faith, like depression, is a cycle of exile and return, I am a prodigal become a pilgrim, if only I can come to my senses and remember to turn toward home." ACEDIA & ME contemplates (and, in places, scours raw) a feeling we each encounter -- some more chronically than others. We all have to summon the will to beat back "soul weariness" at junctures in our lives. Gustave Flaubert wrote, "Aren't you tired, as I am, of waking up every morning and seeing the sun again? Tired of living the same life, of suffering the same pain?" We all, like Norris, do get tired of routine, of losing companions along the way, and of our own insecurities and inabilities to connect. ACEDIA & ME is a comprehensive (some might say exhaustive and might put in a "too" for good measure) exercise in approaching and trying to understand this state from historical and contemporary perspectives. For those who don't mind seeing parts of themselves in the mirror of a book, this newest Norris is confidently recommended.
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73 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Full of great stuff, but a holy mess, September 27, 2008
This review is from: Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Norris says in the introduction to this book that she's been working on it for a long, long time, gathering materials, reading, and writing. I suspect that what she was waiting for - consciously or intuitively - was an organizing structure. She never found it. "Acedia & Me" is full of lots of wisdom and reflection on the spiritual problem of depression/apathy/boredom/distraction, as well as a smattering of wonderful quotes and stories from church literature that has been largely forgotten by the church, and stories about her husband's illnesses, and her own battles with depression (etc.) and quotes from modern authors about society's ills, and... anything else that managed to fall into her file marked "Acedia" over the years. The problem is that it's barely organized at all. And at 327 pages, it's an awful lot of unorganized notes and thoughts. Some things repeat almost verbatim; often variations on the same theme are twenty pages apart. It gets kind of hard to keep plugging through after the first hundred pages or so; while new stuff does turn up now and then, maintaining a sense of progression through the book is almost impossible. There is an awful lot of great stuff here. Norris has diagnosed a problem in society and written some excellent words of insight and reflection about it. Too bad she never found that organizing structure.
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