"I still plod along with books…"

Today is the birthday of Harper Lee, which you may have heard if you tune into The Writer's Almanac on NPR or subscribe to the Almanac's daily email. We lift the following quote from there, with thanks.

I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren't for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We're talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression. [...] Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. 

Harper Lee 

Despondency

Despondency: The Spiritual Teachings of Evagrius of Ponticus on Acedia

by Gabriel Bunge; translated by Anthony P. Gythiel---154 pp. paper $18.00

Acedia, listlessness, despair—whatever the name, this most painful affliction of modern times was well known among the Desert Fathers. In the first half of Despondency, Fr. Gabriel Bunge explores how the fifth-century monk Evagrius diagnoses this complex condition, emphasizing the “working mechanisms of the passions and of their accomplices, the demons.” Evagrius never underestimates his foe (he labels despondency a “conglomerate of all imaginable vices”), yet he is ultimately optimistic about its cure. “Indeed, the medication he prescribes is surprisingly simple…Since despondency is an illness of both the irrational powers of the soul—desire and anger—it is essential to heal both at the root.” Here is cogent, practical advice from a skilled therapist of troubled souls; Bunge provides expert guidance through a welter of patristic terminology, polishing the psychological gems along the way.