One peculiarity of the theses defended in the foregoing chapters is that they diagnose a condition which predicts that the diagnosis will be resisted by those it accurately describes. Literature provides artistic illustrations as accompaniments to philosophical texts which can capture one’s attention in ways academic prose might not. In particular, literature can elicit many of the same emotional experiences that arise in everyday life and can mimic the chaotic and multi-dimensional reality of interpersonal interaction. Consequently, the reader can be deeply engaged by way of imaginative immersion into a richly nuanced narrative, subjective reactions to which provide brand new experiential data with which to theorize. This chapter offers a literary tour of the different masks of sloth in the hopes of rendering the reader receptive to the diagnosis of the preceding three chapters, which, thus illustrated, may seem less foreign than it might otherwise appear. As a result, sloth will be seen to be a misfortune with many faces. Under its onerous influence, one can race from boredom into mindless diversions, or convince oneself that the world is at bottom absurd, or languish in melancholy, or give oneself over to evil, or abdicate one’s agency and be ruled by chance, or play the aesthete and frantically pursue the diminishing pleasures of sensual novelty, or attempt to explain one’s misfortune by appeal to some invented offensive or indifferent feature of God’s, or despair over a perceived spiritual deformity in oneself rooted in guilt or shame.
Long way to Ricci flatness