I grew up in a home with a map of Narnia on one living room wall and a map of Middle Earth on the wall facing it. As a child, I knew the difference between a nymph and a satyr, between a centaur and a faun. I knew Gollum and goblins and orcs and Aslan. So I was given every opportunity to become a hopeless Romantic from a very early age, and I suppose I still mostly am.

In his Introduction to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne mused that those who write realism must dwell only in the world of the probable whereas those who write romance are free to occupy themselves with the possible. He preferred romance because it is “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary might meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”

Chalk it up to my still-lingering adolescent angst or my neurotic adult anxiety, but on most days I wrestle not only with my too other-worldly romanticism but also my too earthly cynicism. I lack belief in the possible and prophesy, however subconsciously, that the probable will quite likely be dark.

Kathleen Norris would quite correctly diagnose my condition as acedia, a word derived from the Greek word akedia, which literally means the absence of caring—the inability to hope in the possible. Acedia is often used as a synonym for sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. It’s characterized by a sense of an overwhelming spiritual torpor and apathy.

I watch my mostly wealthy, mostly well-educated students walk down the hall, and I see my own brand of acedia in them.

All teenagers, whether rich or poor, naturally tend to believe they know everything. Well-educated, privileged teenagers simply have coupled with that natural adolescent insouciance a bit of evidence. They may actually know more than you about some things, both intellectually and experientially. As a teacher, that’s an intimidating awareness.

In theory, the broad and far-reaching exposure of a privileged education is intended to increase the student’s capacity for curiosity and wonder, as well as to create a deepened awareness of their social role as noblesse oblige. In practice, I’m not convinced the early exposure always works, at least not in any immediate sense. As often as not, the kids who have traveled widely, eaten at every restaurant in town, been exposed to all the abstract concepts, read all the books, and seen all the sights are beset by a kind of ennui fit to rival any existentialist philosopher.

For the sake of fairness, I must admit that the students at the school where I am teaching are the least jaded privileged kids I’ve ever been around—one can see good, hopeful idealism and kindness bubble up to the surface much more readily than someone would have found in the private high school I attended. Perhaps I should admit that my personal acedia, bred and then unfortunately cultivated in a difficult adolescence, colors my perception of both my students and the larger world.

I’ve always loved Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Leaden-Eyed,” and in it I see some hope for us as well as a sad appraisal of reality for too many people:

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp, and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

Last year, I taught mostly poor, mostly poorly educated students at a community college in California. This year, I’m teaching privileged kids at a parochial school in Mississippi. In either position, in different ways, my primary task has been to fight that which is leaden-eyed in them. In order to do that, I must continually be on the assault for that which is leaden-eyed in me, and I must honestly admit my own cynicism, how little I expect what I do to matter or what they do or what any of us does.

Evagrius wrote that the cure to acedia was prayer and psalmody.

I’m not sure exactly what that looks like in an English classroom other than reading and writing. Reading about writers like Hawthorne who, according to Magnus Ullen, “portray the difficulties of retaining a notion of the ideal without violating the real.”

Hardened cynic, hopeless idealist, every day I walk into a classroom somewhere between the real world and fairy-land where the actual and the imaginary meet. Every day, I try desperately to honor my ideals while also honoring the real. It’s a difficult dance for any of us, but it’s a deadly serious charge. May God help us cultivate a curiosity, even here in the shadowlands, that purges all the lead from our eyes.