Like a frog slowly boiling in butter, acedia's victim sits, slowly churning in place. I ponder the metaphor, wondering if I've been too clever with phrasing, because I can't get past the imagery.
Acedia means, at root, lack of care. (The a-prefix means "not" , in Greek.) It explains to my satisfaction why depressed people "forget" to bathe. It's not that it takes too much energy (it does, sometimes), but that it is too hard to muster up the energy to care. Sometimes the kindest thing to do is to stand upwind.
I am trying, with only moderate success, to describe the experience of acedia. It is often translated "listlessness", but the restlessness happens first. You run in place, going nowhere, until you are exhausted. What does it matter? Entropy wins in the end, despite all this talk of resurrection, like a day forever a-dawning in the future. Right now, it is rainy, dismal night and anything else seems, at best, unrealistic and at worst, cruel.
Forever a day late, the dollar crumbles and public confidence erodes. What does it all mean? You see the difficulty I am in? You do? I can't see anything because my eyes are closed because of the futility of it all.
The visitor from Porlock has arrived at my door and I'm not sure where I was going, other than a Joycian discourse.
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