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The Wandering Mind - What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Hardcover)
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The Wandering Mind - What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Hardcover)
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The digital era is beset by distraction, and it feels like things
are only getting worse. At times like these, the distant past
beckons as a golden age of attention. We fantasise about escaping
our screens. We dream of recapturing the quiet of a world with less
noise. We imagine retreating into solitude and singlemindedness,
almost like latter-day monks. But although we think of early monks
as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact,
come to them easily. As historian Jamie Kreiner demonstrates in The
Wandering Mind, their attempts to stretch the mind out to God-to
continuously contemplate the divine order and its ethical
requirements-were all-consuming, and their battles against
distraction were never-ending. Delving into the experiences of
early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the
Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Kreiner
shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in
ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests
that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and
Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but
it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it.
The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a
matter of life and death. Even though the world today is vastly
different from the world of the early Middle Ages, we can still
learn something about our own distractedness by looking closely at
monks' strenuous efforts to concentrate. Drawing on a trove of
sources that the monks left behind, Kreiner reconstructs the
techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their
minds-from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive
exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex and diet.
She captures the fleeting moments of pure attentiveness that some
monks managed to grasp, and the many times when monks struggled and
failed and went back to the drawing board. Blending history and
psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of
human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our
own.
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