Skipping Towards Gomorrah

[Steve Maas]

Regarding _Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit 
of Happiness in America_ by Dan Savage.  Skimmed sloth section; Savage shows 
subject short shrift

Steve Maas
----------------------

"Between Franklin's hectic aphorist, Poor Richard, and Melville's doomed 
scrivener, Bartleby, lies about a century of early America, consolidating 
itself as a Christian capitalist state, even as acedia [sloth] was in the 
last stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a secular condition.

Philadelphia, by Franklin's time, answered less and less to the religious 
vision that William Penn had started off with. The city was becoming a kind 
of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods and services 
coming out, traffic inside flowing briskly about a grid of regular city 
blocks. [...] Spiritual matters were not quite as immediate as material 
ones, like productivity! Sloth was no longer so much a Sin against God or 
spiritual good as against a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in 
general not reversible -- that is, against clock time, which got everybody 
early to bed and early to rise."

--From "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee" by Thomas Pynchon.


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