Tristitia

[Joe Allonby]

I really enjoyed reading this again as I avoid returning my twelve
telephone messages.

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> From Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture
> (trans. Ronald I. Martinez, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), Ch.
> 1, "the Noonday Demon," pp. 3-10:
>
> "During the whole of the Middle Ages, a scourge worse than the plague
> that infested the castles, villas, and palaces of the cities of the
> world fell on the dwellings of spiritual life, penetrated the cells
> and cloisters of monasteries, the Thebaid of the hermits, the convents
> of recluses. Acedia (sloth), tristitia (sorrow), taedium vitae
> (weariness, loathing of life), and desidia (idleness) are the names
> the church fathers gave to the death this sin induced in the soul;
> and, although its desolate effigy occupies the fifth position in the
> lists of the Summae virtutum et vitiorum (Summa of virtues and vices),
> in the miniatures of manuscripts, and in the popular representations
> of the seven capital sins, an ancient hermeneutic tradition considered
> it the most lethal of the vices, the only one for which no pardon was
> possible.
>   "The fathers exercised themselves with particular fervor against
> the dangers of this 'noonday demon' ..."
>
> http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/A/agamben_stanzas.html
> http://books.google.com/books?id=1_QI0ag9A1AC
>
> The New York Times
> June 6, 1993
> The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee
> By THOMAS PYNCHON
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html
>