I came across this French word in Lyndall Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 177: “Here is the heart of Eliot’s aboulie in the autumn of 1921: a horrified glimpse of human depravity and the fear that few have the stature to transcend it.” I should have realized that it is the French form of ‘abulia.’ Merriam-Webster: an abnormal lack of ability to act or to make decisions. Further:
The English term we use today comes from a New Latin word that combines the prefix a-, meaning “without,” with the Greek word boulē, meaning “will.” Abulia can refer to the kind of generalized indecision that makes it impossible to choose what flavor ice cream you want, though it was created to name a severe medical disorder that can render a person nearly inert.
Cf. here:
Le terme « aboulie » provient du grec ancien a- (privatif) et boulê (volonté), signifiant littéralement « absence de volonté ». En psychiatrie, il désigne un trouble mental caractérisé par une diminution ou une privation de la volonté, rendant difficile l’initiation et la coordination des actions, même planifiées.
I thank Vito Caiati for recommending Gordon’s outstanding 721 page biography five summers ago. I am currently re-reading it. Biblioteca Vallicelliana accession date: 9 July 2021. The real Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome is described here. Been there, done that. I would be surprised if Dr. Caiati has never played the archivarius in its depths. I myself did not make it inside. Came at the wrong time, a pretty Italian woman informed me. Lunch time, siesta, la dolce vita, the Italian thing.
T. S. Eliot is a man worth a 700 page plus biography. I am not so sure about Richard Yates, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Philip Roth, literary artists of high relatively recent repute. The consummate literary biographer Blake Bailey has written stomping tomes about each. They are meticulously done and you will not find a bad sentence anywhere in those thousands of pages. I have read the first three.
But I wonder: is it a good use of a life to poke through the details of lives of men far from exemplary? Eliot was imperfect but he had a sense of what is at stake in this life. Yates didn’t. Cheever, the ‘Catholic cocksman,’ did, but refused to rein in his concupiscence which he freely indulged with both sexes. Poor Mary Maldisposta,* as he called his wife. He was ever eager to mount her, well into his old age, unsated by his extramural activities, but Mary, though no prude, was, well, maldisposta. Can you blame her?
At what point does literary pahthography negate the value of literary biography?
And what about me? How much am I a philosopher seeking to answer the question How should we live? and how much a literary voyeur?
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*Maldisposta is the feminine singular form of the Italian adjective maldisposto, which translates to ill-disposed, hostile, unfavorable, or prejudiced. It describes a person or attitude that is unwilling, averse, or openly antagonistic towards someone or something. (AI generated.)