pynchon-l-digest V2 #10462

[Doug Millison]

....Boredom, especially in the form of accidia (sometimes spelled
accidie), is one of the main threads running through SPECTRE, Laurence
Rickels's psychoanalytic reading of Bond and his creator. As a kind of
apathy or indifference to life, accidia was identified as a mortal
sin, a form of sloth, by St. Thomas Aquinas. As Rickels shows, Fleming
foregrounded the seriousness of accidia in his introduction to The
Seven Deadly Sins, a collection of essays from 1962 in which each sin
is tackled by a different famous writer. Fleming says, "Of all the
seven, only Sloth in its extreme form of accidia, which is a form of
spiritual suicide and a refusal of joy, [...] has my wholehearted
condemnation, perhaps because in moments of despair I have seen its
face." While in Fleming's Thunderball Bond is "a permanent prey to
lassitude," it is in the beginning of From Russia with Love that the
author's comments on sloth chime in: "Just as, in at least one
religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and
particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the
only vice Bond utterly condemned." ....

James Bond, the Psychopath
 Los Angeles Review of Books by jonathan hahn
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/james-bond-psychopath/
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l