Accidie (pronounced ak-si-dee)
Sloth; apathy, in the sense of both (1) a general listlessness and apathy and (2) spiritual
torpor.
1200–1250:
From the Middle English accidie, from
the Anglo-Norman accidie, from the Old
French accide & accidie, from the Medieval Latin accidia (an alteration of Late Latin acedia (sloth, torpor), from the Ancient
Greek ἀκήδεια
(akḗdeia) (indifference), the construct being ἀ- (a-)
(in the sense of “not”) + κῆδος (kêdos). It was a doublet of acedia, still cited as an
alternative form and replaced the Middle English accide. The word was in
active use between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries and was revived in
the nineteenth as a literary adornment.
Accidie and acediast are nouns and acedious is an adjective; the noun plural
is acediasts.
The alternative literary words include (1) ennui (a gripping listlessness or melancholia caused by boredom; depression), an unadapted borrowing from the French ennui, from the Old French enui (annoyance), from enuier (which in Modern French persists as ennuyer), from the Late Latin inodiō, from the Latin in odiō (hated) and a doublet of annoy, (2) weltschmerz, used as an alternative letter-case form of the German Weltschmerz (an apathetic or pessimistic view of life; depression concerning or discomfort with the human condition or state of the world; world-weariness), the construct being Welt (world) + Schmerz (physical ache, pain; emotional pain, heartache, sorrow) and coined by German Romantic writer Jean Paul (1763–1825) for his novel Selina (published posthumously in 1827) and (3) mal du siècle (apathy and world-weariness, involving pessimism towards the current state of the world, often along with nostalgia for the past (originally in the context of French Romanticism) (literally “disease of the century”) and coined by the French writer Alfred de Musset in his autobiographical novel La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century (1936)).
Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.
In
Antiquity, the Greeks seemed to have refined accidie (which translated
literally as being in “a state so inert as the be devoid of pain or care”) to
be used of those who has become listless and no longer cared for their own
lives or their society, thus distinguishing it from other conditions of
melancholy which tended to be individually focused although in surviving
medical texts, what’s being diagnosed was something like what might now be
called “depression”. Predictably, when
adopted by moral theologians in Christian writing, it was depicted as a sin or
at least a personal flaw. Others wrote of
it as a “demon” to be overcome and even a temptation placed by the Devil, one
to which “young
men who read poetry” seem to have been chronically prone. It can be thought of as falling into the
category of sloth, listed in the Medieval Latin tradition as of the seven deadly
sins and appeared in Dante Alighieri’s (circa 1265–1321) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321)) not only as a
sin worthy of damnation & eternal punishment but the very sin which led
Dante to the edge of Hell. In his
unfinished Summa Theologiae (literally
Summary of Theology), the Italian Dominican friar, philosopher &
theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) noted accidie was a spiritual
sorrow, induced by man’s flight from the Divine good, “…on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over
the spirit”, the kind of despair which can culminate in the even
greater sin of suicide.
Google ngram: Accidie 1800-2020.
Google
ngram: Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not
literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully
indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which
trend(s)), especially over decades. As a
record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the
sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic
and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character
recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a
process AI should improve). Where
numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use
for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.
Etymologists
note that between the mid sixteenth and mid nineteenth centuries the word acedia
was close to extinct and whether it was the revival of interest in the Romantic
poets (often a glum lot) or the increasing number of women becoming novelists, there
was in the late 1800s a revival with the term, once the preserve of
theologians, re-purposed as a decorative literary word; in the “terrible
twentieth century” there was much scope for use and it appears in
the writings of Ian Fleming (1908–1964), Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) and Samuel
Beckett (1906-1989). Intriguingly, in The Decline and Fall of Nokia (2014),
Finnish-based expatriate US writer David J Cord introduced the concept of
corporate acedia, citing the phenomenon as one of the causes of the collapse of
Nokia's once dominant mobile device unit.
Joan Didion (1934-2021) and cigarette with her Daytona Yellow (OEM code 984) 1969 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray (on the C2 Corvette (1963-1967) and in 1968 the spelling had been "Sting Ray”). The monochrome image was from a photo-session commissioned in 1970 by Life magazine and shot by staff photographer Julian Wasser (1933-2023), outside the house she was renting on Franklin Avenue in the Hollywood Hills. To great acclaim, her first work of non-fiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), had just been published.
Writing
mostly, in one way or another, about “feelings”, Joan Didion’s work appealed
mostly to a female readership but when photographs were published of her posing
with her bright yellow Corvette, among men presumably she gained some “street
cred” although that might have evaporated had they learned it was later traded
for a Volvo; adding insult to injury, it was a Volvo station wagon with all
that implies. She was later interviewed about the apparent incongruity
between owner and machine and acknowledged the strangeness, commenting: “I very definitely
remember buying the Stingray because it was a crazy thing to do. I bought it in Hollywood.” Craziness and Hollywood were then of course synonymous and a C3 Corvette
(1968-1982) really was the ideal symbol of the America about which Ms Didion
wrote, being loud, flashy, rendered in plastic and flawed yet underpinned by a solid, well-engineered foundation; the notion of the former detracting from the latter was theme in in her essays on the American
experience.
Disillusioned, melancholic and
clinical, Ms Didion’s literary oeuvre suited the moment because while obviously
political it was also spiritual, a critique of what she called the “accidie” of the
late 1960s, the moral torpor of those disappointed by what had followed the hope
and optimism captured by “Camelot”, the White House of John Kennedy (JFK,
1917–1963; US president 1961-1963). In
retrospect Camelot was illusory but that of course made real the disillusionment
of Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969) leading the people
not to a “great society” but deeper into Vietnam. Her essays were in the style of the “new
journalism” and sometimes compared with those of her contemporary Susan Sontag (1933-2004) but
the two differed in method, tone, ideological orientation and, debatably, expectation if not purpose.
Ms Didion’s used accidie to describe a society which the
troubled 1960s seemed to have bludgeoned into a state not of acquiescence but
indifference, a moral exhaustion.
Her writings were observational (and, as she admitted, sometimes “embellished”
for didactic purposes), sceptical and cool, her conception of the failure of
contemporary politics a matter of describing the disconnect between rhetoric
and reality, understanding the language of theatre criticism was as appropriate
as that of the lexicon of political science.
In a sense, 'twas ever thus but Ms Didion captured the imagination by illustrating
just how far from the moorings of reality the political spectacle of myth-making had drifted.
Ms Sontag’s tone was declarative and distinctly authoritative (in the way of second-wave feminism), tending
often to the polemic and the sense was she was writing in opposition to a
collective immorality, not the kind of moral indifference Ms Didion
detected. Both were students of their
nation’s cultural pathology but one seemed more a palliative care specialist
tending a patient in their dying days while the other offered a diagnosis and
suggested a cure which, while not something to enjoy: "would be good for them". While Ms Didion distrusted
ideological certainty, Ms Sontag engaged explicitly with “isms”, not in the
sense of one writing of the history of ideas but as a protagonist, using
language in an attempt to shape political consciousness, the former a kind of
secular moral theologian mourning a loss of coherence in American life while
the latter was passionate and wrote often with a strident urgency, never losing
the sense that whatever her criticisms, things could be fixed and there was
hope. The irony of being an author to
some degree afflicted by the very accide she described in others was not lost
on Ms Didion.
Susan Sontag, circa 1971, photographed by Jim Cartier. The pop-art portrait of comrade Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976; chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 1949-1976) was a print of Roy Lichtenstein's (1923–1997) Mao (1971) which had been used as the cover for US author Frederic Tuten's (b 1936) novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971). Ms Sontag had written a most favourable review of the book and the framed print was reputedly a gift.
While a stretch to say that in trading-in the Corvette for a Volvo station wagon, Ms Didion was tracking the nation which had moved from Kennedy to Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974), it’s too tempting not to make. Of the Corvette, she used the phrase: “I gave up on it”, later recounting: “the dealer was baffled” but denied the change was related to moving after eight years from Malibu to leafy, up-market suburban Brentwood. While she “…needed a new car because with the Corvette something was always wrong…” she “…didn’t need a Volvo station wagon” although did concede: “Maybe it was the idea of moving into Brentwood.” She should have persevered because as many an owner of a C3 Corvette understands, the faults and flaws are just part of the brutish charm. Whether the car still exists isn't known; while Corvette's have a higher than average survival rate, their use on drag strips & race tracks as well as their attractiveness to males aged 17-25 has meant not a few suffered misadventure.
The configuration of her car seems not anywhere documented but a reasonable guess is it likely was ordered with the (base) 300 horsepower (hp) version (ZQ3) of the 350 cubic inch (5.7 litre) small-block V8, coupled with the Turbo-Hydramatic 400 (TH400) (M40) three-speed automatic transmission (the lighter TH350 wouldn't be used until 1976 by which time power outputs had fallen so much the robustness of the TH400 was no longer required). When scanning the option list, although things like the side-mounted exhaust system (N14) or the 430 hp versions (the iron-block L88 & all aluminium ZL1, the power ratings of what were barely-disguised race car engines deliberately understated, the true output between 540-560 hp) of the 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) big-block V8 would not have tempted Ms Didion, she may have ticked the box for the leather trim (available in six colors and the photos do suggest black (402 (but if vinyl the code was ZQ4)), air conditioning (C60), power steering (N40), power brakes (J50), power windows (A31) or an AM-FM radio (U69 and available also (at extra cost) with stereo (U79)). Given she later traded-in the Corvette on a Volvo station wagon, presumably the speed warning indicator (U15) would have been thought superfluous but, living in Malibu, the alarm system (UA6) might have caught her eye.
An emo with 1977 Volvo 245 station wagon; if she had a Corvette to pose with she’d be smiling because Corvettes can make even emos happy. This is Emma Myers (b 2002) as Pippa "Pip" Fitz-Amobi in A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (Netflix, 2024).
Quintessential symbols of France, Bridget Bardot (b 1934), Citroën La Déesse and a lit Gitanes.
The combination of a car, a woman with JBF and a cigarette continued to draw photographers even after smoking ceased to be glamorous and became a social crime. First sold in 1910, Gitanes production in France survived two world wars, the Great Depression, Nazi occupation but the regime of Jacques Chirac (1932–2019; President of France 1995-2007) proved too much and, following the assault on tobacco by Brussels and Paris, in 2005 the factory in Lille was shuttered. Although Gitanes (and the sister cigarette Gauloise) remain available in France, they are now shipped from Spain and while in most of the Western world fewer now smoke, Gitanes Blondes retain a cult following.
No images seem to exist of Ms Didion with her Volvo station wagon but Laurel Canyon's Kristin Gallegos (b 1984) later followed Julian Wasser’s staging by photographing artist Emily Labowe (b 1993) with a Mercedes-Benz 300 TD station wagon and that once essential accessory: a cigarette. One of the last of the “chrome Mercedes”, the W123 range was in production between 1975-1986 and the station wagon appeared in 1977 with the internal code S123 (only nerds use that and to the rest of the world they’re “W123 wagons”). The designation was “T” (the very Germanic Tourismus und Transport (Touring and Transport)) or TD for the diesel-powered cars and the S123 was the company’s first station wagon to enter series production, previous such “long roof” models coming from coach-builders including many hearses & ambulances as well as station wagons. The English still call station wagons "estates" (a clipping of "estate car") although a publication like Country Life probably still hankers after "shooting brake" and the most Prussian of the German style guides list the compound noun Kombinationskraftwagen which for decades has usually been clipped to the semi-formal Kombiwagen, (plural Kombiwagen or Kombiwägen) or, in general use: Kombi.
That Mercedes-Benz in the mid-1970s decided their first station wagon in regular production should be a “T” (and understood as a Tourenwagen (touring car) rather than a “K” (ie Kombiwagen, the designation used by other manufacturers) reflected the prevailing German view of such cars. Unlike the US where station wagons had long been emblematic of middle-class respectability (often as a family’s second car for the wife & mother) or England where the style enjoyed an association with the upper class HFS (huntin’, fishin’ & shootin’) set, to Germans the utilitarian long-roofs had a down-market image, bought only by those unable to afford separate vehicles for business & pleasure. Coach-builders had of course used Mercedes-Benz saloons as the basis for station wagons, ambulances and hearses but these were always expensive and thus not tainted by association with thriftiness by necessity. In their alphanumeric soup of model designations, Mercedes-Benz had previously used “K” to mean either Kompressor (supercharged) (eg 770 K) or Kurz (short) (eg SSK) and other letters had also done double-duty, “L” standing for either Lang (long) (eg 500 SEL) or Licht (light) (eg SSKL) and “S” could mean both Super (300 SL) or Sports (300 SLR) so for the S123 “K” wasn’t avoided because of fears of confusing folk; it was just an image thing: "Don't mention the kombi". That all changed in the 1980s when the Germans decided wagons were sexy after all, the high performance arms of Audi, BMW & Mercedes-Benz all producing some remarkably fast ones.
Mercedes-Benz G4s: Gepäckwagen (baggage car, top left) & Funkauto (radio car, top right) and 300 Messwagen (bottom left) at speed on the test track, tethered to a W111 sedan (1959-1968, bottom right).
The factory did though over the decades build a handful including a brace of the three-axle G4s (W31, 1934-1939), one configured as a Gepäckwagen (baggage car), the other a Funkauto (radio car). In 1960 there was also the Messwagen (measuring car), a kind of “rolling laboratory” from the era before technology allowed most testing to be emulated in software. The capacious Messwagen was based on the W189 300 “Adenauer” (W186 & W189 1951-1962) and was then state of the art but by the 2020s, the capabilities of all the bulky equipment which filled the rear compartment could have been included in a single phone app. Students of design will admire the mid-century modernism in the curve of the rear-side windows but might be surprised to learn the muscle car-like scoop on the roof is not an air-intake but an aperture housing ports for connecting the Messwagen’s electronic gear with the vehicle being monitored, the two closely driven in unison (often at high speed) on the test track while being linked with a few metres of cabling and although we now live in a wireless age, real nerds know often a cable is preferable, the old ways sometimes best. The Messwagen remained in service until 1972 and is now on display at the factory’s museum in Stuttgart.
The factory's Messwagen wasn't the first use of the big W186/W189 for long-roof variants, hearses and ambulances having appeared in several European countries and there was at least one station wagon, proving consumption can be conspicuous yet still subtle, achieved usually if a bespoke creation is both expensive and functional. The 300 saloons and four-door cabriolets were large, stately and beautifully built, the 1956 example pictured was delivered to a customer in the US who for whatever reason prized exclusivity over capacity or speed, all the major US manufacturers at the time offering station wagons able to accommodate more people and more more luggage while going much faster. The 300 certainly would have delivered better fuel economy but that wouldn't have crossed the mind of the purchaser who would have been deterred from something like a Chrysler New Yorker or Ford Country Squire because they were, by comparison with her one-off, cheap and common whereas a custom built 300 “dripped money”; even to the uninformed they would obviously have been expensive and it was thus a classic "Veblen good" a quirk in the supply & demand curve of orthodox economics in that for a certain (ie the "1%") demographic demand for an item can increase as its price rises. The car still exists, traded between collectors to be exhibited at concours d'elegance.
1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser (left), details of the apparatuses above the windscreen (centre) and the Breezeaway rear window lowered (right)
The 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was notable for (1) the truly memorable model name, (2) the “Breezeway" rear window which could be lowered and (3) having a truly bizarre assembly of “features” above the windscreen. There’s no suggestion that when fashioning the 300 Messwagen the engineers in Stuttgart were aware of the Turnpike Cruiser but had they looked, it could have provided an inspiration for the way access to ports in the roof could have been handled. Unfortunately, the pair of “radio aerials” protruding from the pods at the top of the Mercury’s A-pillars were a mere affectation, a “jet-age” motif embellishing what were actually air-intakes. They were though a harbinger of the way in which future “measuring vehicles” would be configured when various forms of wireless communication had advanced to the point at which a cable connection was no longer required.
