Kathleen Norris battles 'the demon of acedia'

"We have a vast palette of words that attempt to express our downcast moods -- "a funk," "the blues," "the doldrums." All of them abstractions, euphemisms we employ in an effort to pinpoint something elusive -- a sensation that might be a shade less than depression but still has weight, the power to hem us in, to alter our picture of the world.

Kathleen Norris -- a poet, memoirist and oblate -- was all too familiar with this vague sense of lethargy that would sometimes descend like a net. Since her teens she'd struggled with episodes of inertia that spread into a bleak stretch of anxiousness and eventually spun out into indifference.

The first one started with a single thought that "slithered into my Eden, pulling a string of other thoughts, each one worse than the one before," she writes.

That moment would mark the beginning of a recurrence of "bleak moods," but it wouldn't be until Norris reached her 30s that she ran across a word -- acedia -- in the writings of , a 4th century monk, that precisely described not just the mood but the course it would run and the damage it could do:

"The demon of acedia -- also called the noonday demon -- is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. . . . He makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and . . . he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself."

The words had shocking resonance for Norris. "I wanted to figure out why this 4th century writer seemed to know me and seemed to know exactly what I was feeling," she says. In her new book, "Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life"..., Norris attempts to both identify this demon and trace the trajectory of this relic of a word: a term that has gone in and out of usage over centuries for an affliction that is not done with us."

Kathleen Norris battles 'the demon of acedia'

Back to Previous Level