Acedia & me : a marriage, monks, and a writer's life by Norris Kathleen 1947-

Author:Norris, Kathleen, 1947-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Norris, Kathleen, 1947-, Acedia, Melancholy, Sadness, Apathy, Monastic and religious life
Publisher: New York : Riverhead Books
Published: 2008-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

KATHLEEN NORRIS

may have had football stars and cheerleaders in mind is far less significant than Kierkegaard's insistence that beneath our temporal satisfactions, "deep, deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is despair." In a metaphor that delighted me at fifteen, and still instructs me when I am faced with the onset of a despondency whose causes are not easy to discern, Kierkegaard compares despair to "the troll in the fairy story [who] disappears through a crevice no one can see So it is with despair, the

more spiritual it is, the more urgent it is to dwell in an externality behind which no one would ordinarily think of looking for it."

But the question remains: Why Kierkegaard, that sly and most exacting of thinkers, for an adolescent with a spotty understanding of Christian tradition and a constitutional incapacity for philosophical rigor? Kierkegaard could rely on his solid education in the Greek classics and a wide range of theologians. I was an illiterate by comparison. Kierkegaard had read, in the original, the early Christians who had defined despair as sin, as well as Aquinas, who acknowledged that despair often arises out of a fervent desire for the good. But what was I to make of the whirling dervish of Kierkegaard's prose? How could I hope to follow his dazzling array of categories, his atomized language? Under "forms of this sickness (despair)," for instance, he lists: "Infinitude's Despair is to Lack Finitude" and "Finitude's Despair is to Lack Infinitude." Trying to cope with this made my struggle with algebra seem easy.

In Kierkegaardian terms, I gave up on algebra but persisted with the Dane because it was both absurd and necessary to do so. I felt a deep and personal affinity that I could neither explain nor deny. If Soren Kierkegaard was an unlikely companion for a dreamy adolescent

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