Most realist fiction has its feet in psychology or sociology. Ginzburg despises these ways of interpreting life, bringing them on like clowns, only when she is out to entertain. Her comedy plays on psychological and sociological problems. She is particularly funny about adolescent malaise and bourgeois social anxiety, mocking the first and even the second with affection; it is only social pretension that turns her humor savage. But all this is merely a sideshow. She interprets behavior in order to judge it. She judges with understanding and pity, but her understanding and pity are metaphysical, not the social worker’s or analyst’s. In fact, the essay “Silence” (1951) in The Little Virtues can be read as an attack on psychoanalysis. Silence, she says, is the vice of our age; it “should be called by its true name”—which is not, presumably, lack of communication or alienation.The things they tell those of us who go to be psychoanalysed are of no use to us because they do not take our moral responsibility—which is the only choice permitted us in life—into account….
We have been advised to defend ourselves from despair with egotism. But egotism has never solved despair. And we are too used to calling our soul’s vices illnesses….
Silence must be faced and judged from a moral standpoint. Because silence, like acedia and like luxury, is a sin.
From the two reprinted novels—both autobiographical—one gets the impression that among the seven deadly sins, acedia is the one Natalia Ginzburg understands best, her own besetting sin.
Gabriele Annan, "The Force of Habit." The New York Review of Books, 11/7/1985.
*acedia: Spiritual or mental sloth; apathy. Early 17th century via late Latin from Greek akēdia ‘listlessness’, from a- ‘without’ + kēdos ‘care’.
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John Cassian, a monk and theologian wrote in the early 5th century about an ancient Greek emotion called acedia. A mind “seized” by this emotion is “horrified at where he is, disgusted with his room … It does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading.” He feels:such bodily listlessness and yawning hunger as though he were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast … Next he glances about and sighs that no one is coming to see him. Constantly in and out of his cell, he looks at the sun as if it were too slow in setting. ...Cassian and other early Christians called acedia “the noonday demon,” and sometimes described it as a “train of thought.” But they did not think it affected city-dwellers or even monks in communities.
Rather, acedia arose directly out the spatial and social constrictions that a solitary monastic life necessitates. These conditions generate a strange combination of listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate. ...
Reviving the language of acedia is important to our experience in two ways.
First, it distinguishes the complex of emotions brought on by enforced isolation, constant uncertainty and the barrage of bad news from clinical terms like “depression” or “anxiety.” Saying, “I’m feeling acedia” could legitimise feelings of listlessness and anxiety as valid emotions in our current context without inducing guilt that others have things worse.
Second, and more importantly, the feelings associated with physical isolation are exacerbated by emotional isolation – that terrible sense that this thing I feel is mine alone. When an experience can be named, it can be communicated and even shared.
Jonathan L. Zecher, "The Lost Name for the Emotion We're All Feeling Right Now." The Conversation, 8/26/2020.
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Acedia was a malady that apparently plagued many Medieval monks. It's a sense of no longer caring about caring, not because one had become apathetic, but because somehow the whole structure of care had become jammed up.What could this particular form of melancholy mean in an urgent global crisis? On the face of it, all of us care very much about the health risks to those we know and don't know. Yet lurking alongside such immediate cares is a sense of dislocation that somehow interferes with how we care. ...Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don't notice them very often. We don't know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive.
What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It's that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now.
Nick Couldry, "The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world." CNN Opinion, 9/22/2020.
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I finished reading Ginzburg's All Our Yesterdays a few days ago and was looking for a clever writer who could articulate why her perspective feels like a restorative spiritual tonic to me at this particular life juncture, and I stumbled across Annan's review. The word acedia jumped out—I didn't know it, so I started looking for definitions, and turned up the piece by Zecher. After I screenshotted it on Instagram, my friend Sarah sent me the link to Couldry's article.
A weird and helpful little train of serendipities, and a peculiarly profound relief to have this feeling I have been struggling with known and named. Maybe it will help you, too.
