Deadly Lethargy

Rachel Kelly suggests strategies to cope with the dreaded midday malaise (a short extract from the Jan/Feb edition of the Idler, out now)

The New Year: a time for resolutions and those glowing, glossy articles in newspaper lifestyle sections – the sort of articles I used to write myself.

But what if you’re neither feeling bright-eyed nor bushy-tailed? What if you feel overwhelmed by lethargy? You find it difficult to get up from the sofa, even as the clock hits midday. Your life is marked by a lack of interest in humanity, and an utter boredom in doing anything at all.

Some would describe this as sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. The other six will sound familiar: pride, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and lust. The deadly sins were agreed by monks for monks in about the fourth century, and sloth was often described as “accidie”.

This word (and its relation “acedia”) comes from the Ancient Greek akēdia. It means a lack of care, or indifference, and is often translated as the “noonday demon”. In other words, accidie is sloth in its extreme form. Ian Fleming referred to it as a kind of “spiritual suicide and a refusal of joy” in his introduction to The Seven Deadly Sins published in 1962.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his thrilling life, Fleming said he worried that sloth was always lurking in the wings. In fact, accidie pops up in his novels. In Live and Let Die, we hear Mr Big telling Bond: “I suffer from boredom. I am prey to what the early Christians called ‘accidie’, the deadly lethargy that envelops those who are sated, those who have no more desires.”

I first came across accidie in a book called The Desert Fathers, a collection of sayings (translated from the original Latin and Ancient Greek) by wandering scholars and the early Christian ascetics who lived in the Egyptian desert. In one chapter, the book’s translator recounts the words of Cassian of Marseille, a fourth-century monk also known as John the Ascetic. He describes accidie as a type of listlessness, experienced by wandering monks and solitary types, and which especially affects people around midday.

When accidie “besieges the unhappy mind,” Cassian writes, “it begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell, and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren, whether they be dwelling with one or some way off, as careless and unspiritual minded persons.

“Towards 11 o’clock or midday,” he continues, “it induces such lassitude of body and craving for food as one might feel after the exhaustion of a long journey and hard toil, or the postponing of a meal throughout a two or three days’ fast.”

Our January/February issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.