Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History review – ennui and its origins

Francis O’Gorman’s study of why we worry covers everything from medieval monastic life to modern cultural theory without really providing any answersBrooding in their cells, medieval monks identified a malaise they called accidie – not acid indigestion of the soul, but an apathetic and self-disgusted inertia. It overtook them in the static afternoons, so they called it “the noonday demon”. Francis O’Gorman has a bogey of his own, which attacks him in the middle of the night, and his book about anxiety begins at 4.06 am as he works through scenarios of imaginary disaster provoked by his uncertainty about whether he has locked the back door of his house. We have all been there; some of us spend a few hours there every night, watching a digital clock indifferently bat its eyelid as we wait for the bleary dawn to brighten the sky and wipe away our panic.A monastic worrier in the fourth century, Evagrius the Solitary, said that accidie’s symptoms included “a hatred of manual labour”. O’Gorman – who is a literature professor, and as such a remote descendant of socially marginal self-flagellators like Evagrius – here sets himself a brisk therapeutic task by writing a book that attempts to cure or at least comprehend his misery. He alleviates his problem by sharing it with the rest of us: we are all, he claims, the victims of a metaphysical calamity. We worry because we no longer believe in the gods who used to control our destinies; responsible for ourselves,...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: History Books Health, mind and body Philosophy Society Culture Depression Psychology Source Type: news