NONFICTION

The early Christian monks, who lived in the desert, knew the condition of acedia all too well. Familiar with what they called the "noonday demon," who tempted them to torpor and despair, they advised how to vanquish the tormentor.

Kathleen Norris has heeded that advice, as she now perceptively describes her own sapping encounters with it in "Acedia and Me."

It's part intellectual history, part personal memoir, and writer and poet Norris also is offering what she considers a diagnosis of many current ills. Norris suggests that "much of the restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plague us today is the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress." She also carefully distinguishes acedia from depression. Referring to her own experience with depression, she observes it has "an external cause -- and is amenable to treatment in ways that acedia is not."

Memoirs of spiritual experiences can sometimes seem irritatingly superior or priggish. This book, fortunately, is neither. Norris deftly moves between the spiritual and personal, beginning with her first encounter with acedia as a teenager.

A sophomore at a prep school in Hawaii, Norris, bored by her summer job, increasingly found no point in doing anything -- "Why bother?" became a constant refrain. At Bennington College, she embraced literature -- becoming a noted poet -- and abandoned religion. And while continuing to experience bouts of acedia, it was only in her 30s, when married and living in South Dakota, that she began attending church again.

Though she was feeling more anchored and less prone to acedia, her husband, a fellow poet, began drinking heavily. He also had a history of mental and medical problems --"enough medical history for five or six people" -- and his illnesses, which include an attempted suicide and lung cancer, all tested her tendency to acedia. Her wide readings and her numerous friendships with contemporary Benedictine monks, helped, as did prayer.

Norris also suggests that "poetry -- psalms and hymns -- can offer a remedy for the human tendency to take refuge in indifference."

This is a richly allusive spiritual handbook for living, grounded in faith, enriched by a poetic sensibility and realistic about the challenges to be faced -- and a provocative antidote to the way we live now.
Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.