January 16th, 2005
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Sloth
is one of the seven deadly sins. St. Thomas Aquinas [coincidentally patron of the Catholic parish at UVa] calls it “sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good… [it] is evil in its effect, if it so oppresses man as to draw him away entirely from good deeds.”
At the stroke of the new year in Japan, Buddhist temples all over the country will strike a bell 108 times to signal the end to the old and aid in freeing man from the 108 earthly desires (joya no kane). I’m quite sure something to the effect of sloth is included among them.
It is also perhaps the greatest weakness of mine that drives me to depression and self-loathing.
This weekend I may have set a new record in personal lethargy, or at least disgusting ambivalence. In the last three days I have spent nearly as much or possibly more time in bed than I have showing my visiting friend around Tokyo. It is revolting that I have wallowed in half-consciousness for over thirty hours since Friday. Getting out of bed at two or three with the daylight mostly gone drives me mad. I am doing nothing. I have done nothing. Nothing has been done. And before me lays a seemingly endless trail of barely begun ambitions and much talked about changes in my life. The weight of my failures is demoralizing. And so I sit in my room, clothes and dishes strewn about, tottering between mindless sensory indulgence and thoughts of a thousand frayed ends. What have I done these three days to refine my character, or claim accomplishment for? Nothing.
Perhaps taken in a grander view this is not so significant, except that weekends for me are like smoldering sticks of warmth between relentless, waking marches through futile cold and darkness two and a half times long, marches where accomplishing anything other than my service to the company is an unspoken impossibility. Demanding focus generates fatigue. Fatigue requires rest. Rest requires time, little of which is left from demanding focus. So forty-eight hours a week become a few scant drops of water on a shriveled tongue, drops so important that to not extract every atom of utility from each is a damnable waste. This paucity generates more stress, which breeds desperation and flawed efforts. And so time creeps like a landslide, smearing filth and pestilence over every thing I do, so much of my world is viewed through spotted glasses and stained pillowcases.
And so, though happy to spend this weekend with my friend, I am again pulled a little farther down into frustration and feelings of ineffectuality. So many ways to fix my life falling farther and farther out of focus, leaving deliverance an increasingly obscure concept.
