“All I do is eat, sleep, drink, and be negligent.”
—John of Dalyatha, 8th century
And from the 4th century, a description of my reading practice for most of my life:
…yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to read for a while; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings, finds fault with the writing and the ornamentation. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep.
Ah, all those quiet hours in libraries in all those years in all those schools.
The problem, according to the monks, was acedia, the “noonday demon.” Caused not by modern technology (as we mean “modern”), like cellphones and streaming services and social media, but by…books. The modern technology of the fifth century, where we find this condemnation in “The Sayings of the Desert Elders”:
The Prophets compiled the Scriptures, and the Fathers copied them, and their successors learned to repeat them by heart. Then this generation came and placed them in cupboards as useless things.
Which reminds me that the Bible was once regarded as the best-selling book in the world, but more accurately as the one most likely to be found in every American home (or near enough for dammit), and also as a classic. A classic being a book everyone praises and no one reads. Like Joyce’s Ulysses.
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