W I N T E R 2011
In the very end, the kid resists the judge. Perhaps it was the memory of his drunken father’s reading of “poets whose names are now lost,” but the kid’s early susceptibility to the judge at the revival appears to weaken over time. All the other members of the gang ap‐ pear joined in their “terrible covenant,” but the kid alone, despite his atrocities, offers some help and mercy to his fellows, even refusing at one point to murder Holden. The judge knows of the kid’s flickering remainder of decency, stating, “I’d have loved you like a son,” except “you alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency.” In keeping some clemency, the kid loses the judge’s permission to kill and maim and violate and so is actually guilty for his acts. He is a “witness against” himself, claims the judge, for he “sat in judgment on [his] own deeds” and did not give in en‐ tirely to the way of war. Holden simply cannot abide this, must reas‐ sert his status as suzerain, and murders the kid in an outhouse; “he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh” before proclaiming his victory over the world— ”He says that he will never die.” The judge of fiction serves as a diabolical revelation of much our actual malaise, one held captive to the madness of acedia, or sloth. Having rejected any norms given in creation, freedom is under no authority other than the awful lightness of the will, and we are free to do as we wish, including violence against all being.
A
cedia, the “noon day demon,” so called since it strikes in the tedium of the afternoon, receives a surprising amount of attention in early monastic literature. Evagrius of Ponticus, a fourth‐century Egyptian monk, considers it the most troublesome of the demonic thoughts, describing the demon as follows: he causes the monk continuously to look at the windows and forces him to step out of his cell and to gaze at the sun to see how far it still is from the ninth hour, and to look around, here and there, whether any of his brethren is near. Moreover, the demon sends him hatred against the place, against life itself, and against the work of his hands.… Sloth is not laziness, although the term in time does come to mean mere inactivity. Rather it reveals frustration and hate, a disgust at place and “life itself.” In acedia the monk abhors what God has giv‐ 87