October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Kathleen Norris began her writing career as a poet, and after graduating from Bennington College in Vermont in 1969, she lived in New York and associated with Andy Warhol and his circle. However, in 1974, she and her future husband traveled to Lemmon, South Dakota, after her grandmother's death and eventually settled there permanently. Although a married Protestant, she sought and found spiritual support at a Benedictine monastery near her new home. Norris' spiritual memoirs, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace, have captured readers' attention and affection. These works blend essay and memoir with an examination of scholarly topics concerning spiritual life as well as a meditation on how these topics relate to Norris' personal life, transcending denomination and doctrine.

In Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life, Norris provides an in-depth history and discussion of acedia, a soul-weary indifference that she suggests is similar to, but distinct from, clinical depression, describing how it has manifested in her marriage to poet David Dwyer, her spiritual life, and her writing career. In our discussions, we will consider Norris' contention that this ancient concept and its remedies are especially relevant to the quality of our lives in the 21st century. We will also explore connections to other books we have read this year. For example, what connections can be made between Laurence Gonzales' "Rules of Adventure" in his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why and Norris' suggestions for how to work with acedia? Do you think Chris McCandless' wandering across the country and his final, tragic journey to Alaska were a manifestation of acedia? What about Mildred Armstrong Kalish, author of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, and Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying, and her family? Why didn't they succumb to acedia's temptations? And what about us? Can we rise to the complex challenges facing our global climate, culture, and economy using the suggestions offered by Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Bill McKibben in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, and Fareed Zakaria in The Post-American World?

We hope you will join our discussions: Tuesday, October 6, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, October 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

Meanwhile, consider these quotations from the last chapter of Acedia & Me, a commonplace book of other writers' reflections on acedia, and how they resonate with the ideas of the authors we have read so far this year:

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase. --Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) The Conquest of Happiness

Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?

Why has man entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history?

Why is the good life which men have achieved in the twentieth century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders can divert one from the sadness of ordinary mornings? --Walker Percy (1916-1990) The Message in the Bottle

I'd say that the quantity of boredom, if boredom is measurable, is much greater today than it once was. Because the old occupations, at least most of them, were unthinkable without a passionate involvement: the peasants in love with their land . . . the shoemakers who knew every villager's feet by heart; the woodsmen; the gardeners . . . The meaning of life wasn't an issue, it was there with them, quite naturally, in their workshops, in their fields. . . . Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy . . . [which] has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time. --Milan Kundera (b. 1929) Identity

Just as the excellence of an individual life depends to a large extent on how free time is used, so the quality of a society hinges on what its members do in their leisure time. . . . We have seen that at the social as well as the individual level habits of leisure act as both effects and . . . causes. . . . When work turns into a boring routine and community responsibilities lose their meaning, it is likely that leisure will become increasingly more important. And if a society becomes too dependent on entertainment, it is likely that there will be less psychic energy left to cope creatively with the technological and economic challenges that will inevitably arise. --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (b. 1934) Finding Flow