Sloth

(Found here)

The notion of acedia means that a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being; that beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not at one with himself.

—Josef Pieper

When autumn came, my grandfather set up
Behind a metal desk in his garage,
With slender ball-peen hammer and curved pick
   To hull and crack

The acrid mound of dusty, bruised, green husks
That each held in its core a small black walnut.
He’d gather them each year, while raking leaves,
   And bring them here.

Other men I have known had other passions,
To sell insurance or run clothing stores,
To coach a squad of boys to pitch and hit
   In summer league.

And we are so impressed by excellence,
By concentration, how it shuts the world out
And brushes off distraction with a rudeness
   Quite accidental,

That some have thought that this was our vocation,
The answer to the question why we’re here,
And whose unceasing cultivation is
   Our happiness.

But even as a boy, when I would see,
Stowed in my idle laziness, the girls
Solicitous of every teacher’s praise,
   Those busy bodies

Who volunteered to cook hot meals for old folks,
To tutor after school, or paint bright signs
For spirit week, I’d sense their flitting ache
   Of restlessness.

And though I felt rebuked by their goodwill,
And knew my brooding silence in the lunchroom
Was also discontent, if not distraction,
   And marked for shame,

I nonetheless thought they had fled the question
Posed by their selves, or pushed it off beyond
Tomorrow with assurance that they had
   Done what was asked.

And later, when I saw what Pascal wrote
About the king possessed of everything
Who would not have himself be left to sit
   In solitude,

For fear his roving mind’s eye might return
Upon the glowering emptiness within
And there, cut off from glittering abundance,
   Find gnawing misery,

I knew that man, contemptible and great,
Could build a far-flung empery from worry,
An earnest moral sentence from a lie
   He tells himself;

And knew reflective anguish, in being thought,
Resembled more than humming outward deeds
What deed and thought both parody: that peace
   We fear to seek.

For it is silly, Aristotle says,
To think the gods live their eternity
Fiddling about with war or sex or money.
   They are all stillness.

No less must we, who crack our meat from shells
And earn commissions sweating at the office,
Set by our deeds at last for that pure act
   Of godlike rest.

~James Matthew Wilson