TRP on sloth...

[Bradley O'Neill]

Thanks Nicole, I found the sloth article. Now, anybody care to start a
tangent off of the following?

 An excerpt from "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee", TRP
The New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1993, pp. 3, 57.


"Channel-surfing and VCR-jockeying may require a more nonlinear awareness
than may be entirely compatible with the venerable sin of Sloth -- some
inner alertness or tension, as of someone sitting in a yoga posture, or in
Zen meditation. Is Sloth once more about to be, somehow, transcended?
Another possibility of course is that we have not passed beyond
acedia at all, but that it has only retreated from its long-familiar venue,
television, and is seeking other, more shadowy environments -- who knows?
computer games, cult religions, obscure trading floors in faraway cities --
ready to pop up again in some new form to offer us cosmic despair on the
cheap....Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems
increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow,
despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in
virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains
of the Acedia Squad."