Squaring TRP's Luddite Essay with His Sloth Essay

[Smoke Teff]

Typed my way through a brief attempt to understand or at least meditate on
these two essays in tandem upon a revisit of them yesterday...

Maybe not worth your time, but if anybody's interested in reacting or
offering any insight, I imagine it'll be worth mine. The maybe-finite
resource of my time, that is.


Luddite essay here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/
pynchon-luddite.html

Sloth here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html

Luddite essay is '84. Sloth '93.

End of the Luddite essay:

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come
- you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.
It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us
devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly
something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we
should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however
minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which
he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the
first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:





*As the Liberty lads o'er the seaBought their freedom, and cheaply, with
blood, So we, boys, weWill die fighting, or live free,And down with all
kings but King Ludd!*


The last two paragraphs of the Sloth essay:

Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of serious
concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue to evolve away
from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life
really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a
beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal.
The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth -- defiant sorrow in the face of
God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin.

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.


Does this seem like an evolution in his thinking from the Luddite essay?

He's so--even in his nonfic--exploratory, proceeding by a kind of
thinking-at-speed logic, but also ambulatory, wandering, without apparent
destination, toying with different ideas, tones...

So while I'm both (for better or worse, not really purposely but
inevitably) always studying Pynchon for lessons in how to live and think,
I'm also always hesitant to decisively identify too much explicit opinion
or ideology.

But I usually come out of the Luddite essay--or at least look back on
it--feeling like he's kind of pro-Luddism, or at least entangling Luddism
with certain lineages and inclinations that he might either note with some
affection or even identify with. Basically it feels like it has some note
of endorsement to it.

The sloth essay I usually look back on with the idea that he's offering a
kind of defense/endorsement of sloth, a kind of passive resistance to
capitalistic/only-forward time, to the treatment of time as a finite and
exploitable resource. But actually his movement through it is complicated.
It is sometimes the way I remember it. But then it's also other things. He
initially frames it as one of Aquinas's seven deadlies. Aquinas calls it
acedia. Pynchon seems to formulate his idea of it primarily from this
vantage point.

Here are the different mentions of acedia in the essay.

1) "Acedia" in Latin means sorrow, deliberately self-directed, turned away
from God, a loss of spiritual determination that then feeds back on in to
the process, soon enough producing what are currently known as guilt and
depression, eventually pushing us to where we will do anything, in the way
of venial sin and bad judgment, to avoid the discomfort.

2) 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 was in the last
stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a secular condition.

3) BY the time of "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" (1853),
acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an
offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robber-baron capitalism,
the title character develops what proves to be terminal acedia.

4) In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a
failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the
rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920's and
30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the
Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike are full
of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort
involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing good
present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass them
by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life. Though it has never
lost its deepest notes of mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as
outright despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price,
a deliberate turning against faith in anything because of the inconvenience
faith presents to the pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers and the rest.

5) 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.

And 6) happens in the last paragraph I pasted above. I guess looking at it
now it doesn't necessarily seem like TRP's really abandoning or shifting
his identification with/endorsement of/sympathy for Luddism. Maybe he's
even saying, as we're increasingly defined by technology, Luddism becomes a
more logical, potent, holy, common(?), effective(??) kind of sloth than
ever before.

Really maybe he's saying sloth was once--in the Age of Miracles--an
inhibition to a vividly felt/engaged experience of the world, but now, in a
less holy world, sloth isn't despairingly turning away from the holy but
from the unholy/unholiness.

So by a weird kind of divergent and antagonstic evolution, sloth gets
decoupled from its "acedia" origins and becomes a resistance to some old
ghost-half of itself. Despair against despair. A face and its mirror image
turning away from each other.

But was it that original coupling of sloth and acedia itself--the turning
away from the holy--that led out of the Age of Miracles? Or maybe as
Aquinas would have it, it was 1/7 of the story.



Do you see much movement in TRP's thinking over the 9-yr publication gap
between these two things?
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