What shall we talk about, you and I, who are getting our first degrees from Queen’s today? The problem is a little easier than is usually the ca, becau we are both going into new jobs. I have been an author for many years, and I intend to go on being one. But being an author isn’t a job—it is a state of mind; also, it is not a gainful occupation except in a rather restricted n. I have been earning my living as a journalist for twenty years, and now I am giving up that sort of work to take a different sort of job in a university. I shall be very green at it, and I expect I shall do a lot of things the wrong way. Perhaps I shall be a failure, but I have failed at veral things already, and somehow I have lived through it. Failure at a specific task is always disagreeable and sometimes it is humiliating. But there is only one kind of failure that really breaks the spirit, and that is failure in the art of life itlf. That is the failure that one does well to fear.
新婚对联What is it like, this failure in the art of life? It is the failure which manifests itlf in a loss of interest in really important things. It does not come suddenly, there is nothing dramatic about it, and thus it works with a dreadful advantage; it creeps upon us, and once it has us in its grip, it is hard for us to recognize what ails us.
It is not for nothing that this failure was reckoned by medieval theologians as one of the Seven Deadly Sins. I suppo you know what they were. Wrath, Gluttony, Envy, Avarice, and Lechery are not very hard to recognize and are perilously easy to justify, by one means or another. Pride is an extremely subtle sin becau it is so clever at disguising itlf as something el, and tho astute men St. Ambro and St. Augustine thought it the most dangerous of all the sins. But it is the venth which I think is particularly prevalent in our day; medieval theologians called it Sloth.
Sloth is not really a suitable name for it now, becau the word has come to mean a sluggishness and inactivity which is chiefly physical. But the sloth the theologians meant, the sloth which can damn you in this world and perhaps in the next, is spiritual. There was a better name, a Latin name, for it; it was also called Accidie, and it meant intellectual and spiritual torpor, indifference, and lethargy.
国庆高速To be guilty of Acedia普法宣传活动总结 it is not necessary to be physically sluggish at all. You can be as busy as a bee. You can fill your days with activity, bustling from meeting to meeting, sittin
g on committees, running from one party to another in a perfect whirlwind of movement. But if, meanwhile, your feelings and nsibilities are withering, if your relationships with people near to you are becoming more and more superficial, if you are losing touch even with yourlf, it is Acedia which has claimed you for its own.员工社保会计分录>清炖羊排的做法
山东菜系>企业信息化管理How can it be recognized? Anatole France said that the great danger of increasing age was that the feelings atrophied, and we mistook the nsation for the growth of wisdom. It is true that as one grows older, one’s n of proportion may become greater, and things which troubled us or wounded us deeply in our youth em less significant. But that is a different thing from feeling nothing deeply, and leaping to the conclusion that therefore nothing is really very important. As one grows older, one learns how to spare onelf many kinds of unnecessary pain, but one is in great danger if one ceas to feel pain of any kind. If you cannot feel pain at some of the harsh circumstances of life, it is very likely that you have cead to feel joy at some of the satisfactions and delights of life. When that happens, one lives at all times under a mental and spiritual cloud; it is always wet weather in the soul. That is Acedia, and it was called a Deadly Sin becau it
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dimmed and discouraged the spirit, and at last killed it.
I am sure that all of you know some people who have yielded to Acedia. They are the dampers, the wet blankets of life. Unfortunately some of them have a great attraction for the young. Their chronic lack of enthusiasm looks so much like sophistication. They are often clever people, who are adept at putting a chilly finger on the weak spot in whatever attracts their friends. They ldom make mistakes, becau they never put themlves in a position where they are not complete masters of the situation. They take a sly pleasure in the failure of others, and they are always ready to say ‘I told you so’. They have made just one great—indeed monstrous—mistake: they have died to joy and pain, and thus to feeling.
The opposites of the people are not, of cour, tho who allow every enthusiasm to run away with them, who hearts always rule their heads, who go a-whoring after everything that is new. They are, on the contrary, people who take pains to keep their common n in repair, and who keep their intelligence bright, but who also make daily
efforts to meet experience with a fresh vision, and to give to everything that comes their way the measure of feeling, of emotion, of charity and understanding—yes, and also of pain—that it needs in order to understand it.
