Hearing Everything at Once and Listening to Nothing: The Acedia of Absence

Abstract

The title for this article by John Main O.S.B. is meant to evoke the sheer disorientation of our contemporary culture. Strikingly, he wrote it before the flowering of our pressure-inducing, digitally demanding and often indigestible world. The psychologist and social scientist Sherry Turkle talks about our drowning in what she describes as the ‘volume and velocity’ of our lives today. The amount, sound and speed of our lives, however, is not without consequence. This article attempts to explore some of that cost to us at a personal level. One way of capturing it is through the experience of acedia described and transmitted in the 4th century by Evagrius and Cassian. It is the experience of a deep disjuncture within ourselves which quite often simply outwits us. Two millennia later Andre Louf and Thomas Merton among others, pick this up as a description of modernity and the kind of self it forms, for the religious and non-religious alike. This article, while admitting that paradox, makes reference to examples in literature, the social sciences, philosophy and childhood and invites the reader to consider acedia as a new common language for dialogue.