I came across this French word in Lyndall Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life<\/strong> (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 177:\u00a0“Here is the heart of Eliot’s aboulie<\/em> 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\u00a0 it is the French form of ‘abulia.’\u00a0 Merriam-Webster<\/a>: an\u00a0abnormal lack of ability to act or to make decisions.\u00a0 Further<\/a>:<\/p>\n The English term we use today comes from a New Latin word that combines the prefix\u00a0a-, meaning “without,” with the Greek word\u00a0boul\u0113, meaning “will.”\u00a0Abulia\u00a0can 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.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Cf. here<\/a>:<\/p>\n Le terme \u00ab\u202faboulie\u202f\u00bb provient du grec ancien\u00a0a-<\/em>\u00a0(privatif) et\u00a0boul\u00ea<\/em> (volont\u00e9), signifiant litt\u00e9ralement \u00ab\u202fabsence de volont\u00e9\u202f\u00bb. En psychiatrie, il d\u00e9signe un trouble mental caract\u00e9ris\u00e9 par une diminution ou une privation de la volont\u00e9, rendant difficile l\u2019initiation et la coordination des actions, m\u00eame planifi\u00e9es.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I thank Vito Caiati for recommending Gordon’s outstanding 721 page biography five summers ago. I am currently re-reading it.\u00a0 Biblioteca Vallicelliana<\/em>\u00a0 accession date: 9 July 2021.\u00a0 The real Biblioteca Vallicelliana<\/em> in Rome is described here<\/a>.\u00a0 Been there, done that. I would be surprised if Dr. Caiati has never played the archivarius<\/a> in its depths.\u00a0 I myself did not make it inside. Came at the wrong time, a pretty Italian woman informed me. Lunch time, siesta, la dolce vita<\/em>, the Italian thing.<\/p>\n T. S. Eliot is a man worth a 700 page plus biography. I am not so sure about\u00a0 Richard Yates, John Cheever<\/a>, Charles Jackson<\/a>, and Philip Roth, literary artists of high relatively recent repute. The consummate literary biographer Blake Bailey has written stomping tomes about each.\u00a0 They are meticulously\u00a0 done and you will not find a bad sentence anywhere in those thousands of pages.\u00a0 I have read the first three.<\/p>\n But I wonder:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Yates didn’t.\u00a0 Cheever, the ‘Catholic cocksman,’ did, but refused to rein in his concupiscence which he freely indulged\u00a0 with both sexes. Poor Mary Maldisposta<\/em>,* as he called his wife.\u00a0 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<\/em>. Can you blame her?<\/p>\n At what point does literary pahthography negate the value of literary biography?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n _______________<\/p>\n *Maldisposta<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0is the feminine singular form of the Italian adjective\u00a0<\/span>maldisposto<\/span><\/strong>, which translates to\u00a0<\/span>ill-disposed<\/span><\/strong>,\u00a0<\/span>hostile<\/span><\/strong>,\u00a0<\/span>unfavorable<\/span><\/strong>, or\u00a0<\/span>prejudiced<\/span><\/strong>. <\/span>\u00a0It describes a person or attitude that is\u00a0<\/span>unwilling<\/span><\/strong>,\u00a0<\/span>averse<\/span><\/strong>, or\u00a0<\/span>openly antagonistic<\/span><\/strong> towards someone or something.\u00a0 (AI generated.)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I came across this French word in Lyndall Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 177:\u00a0“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 … Continue reading “Word of the Day: Aboulie<\/i> with a note on Literary Pathography”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,40,296,280],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-matters","category-literary-matters","category-literary-pathography","category-vocabulary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14277"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14282,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14277\/revisions\/14282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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