Word: sloth
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Mauriac's latest novel, The Loved and the Unloved, rehearses his usual themes: human flesh as ineradicable temptation, romantic love as a path to mutual hatred, bourgeois life as a variety of spiritual sloth, and free will as man's great burden ("Our bad actions belong wholly to us"). The book is written in a style that is almost spectacularly gaunt. In tone it resembles a medieval morality play; in shape, a modern dance confined to anguished and angular gestures...
...reformed by Pentheus, the villagers of Laxdale have only one wish in life-to see Parliament vote them money for a decent road over the moors. Instead, Laxdale gets a personal visit from Mr. Pettigrew, a blue-nosed Labor M.P. who regards Highland life as the epitome of insanitary sloth. He brings a shapely wife, who admires his Penthean principles but turns to lustier men for her Dionysian pleasures. Along with the Pettigrews have come a varied bunch of visitors, including a novelist in flight from the tax collectors, a journalist, a Greek professor, a gang of salmon poachers...
After they had exchanged a few prances and roars, seven more brightly costumed devils strutted forward to shout their vain glorious boasts and be routed, one by one, by Michael. Envy ("I am the worst of the capital sins") wore a mask of interlaced serpents; Sloth was a yawning frog; Lust was masked by lizards. Last of all came La Diabla, the she-devil. With her seductive smile and flouncing skirts, provocatively hoisted as she danced, the tempting she-devil managed to give the archangel a bad half-hour...
Once upon a time, many good people considered that reading novels was a sin comparable to sloth. When good novelists, with the help of critics and changing times, made the habit respectable, fiction began to outsell nonfiction. During the past few years, the novel has lost ground so rapidly that 1951 may be put down in literary histories as the year of the great debate: What is the novel's future-if any? It is not entirely an academic question. Publishers are shying away from novels, and for a good publishers' reason: people are not rushing...
...There are thirty-six ways of meeting a dilemma and the best of them is to run away." To an Oriental, this represented the wisdom of the bamboo shoot which bends before the prevailing wind. To Westerners obsessed with slum clearance, sanitation and overall reform, it sounded like simple sloth. Faced with cultural mysteries, Westerners concocted superficial myths. The big myth about the Chinese: that they don't know how to "get things done." Upshot of such reasoning: Chiang Kai-shek's government was scuttled while otherwise hardheaded Westerners (e.g., "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell) sang the praises...