Peter Jones

It's like you're standing in a freezing cold river and the water's rushing towards you, but you can't move.

It's a sense of falling out of love with all the things that used to light up your life.

Elizabeth of Shownow, who's this nun from the 12th century in the Rhineland, she describes her Arcadia this way.

She used to love being a nun.

Everything about it, the reading, the singing, all of it, perfect.

One day she's late for mass and suddenly, when the singing starts, her lips move but the voice doesn't come out.

She goes to read a book later and she can't get through a page, puts it down.

It's all nothing to her now.

Everything that used to make her heart sing now leaves her feeling cold and dead inside.

This is Arcadia.

It's when all the love we've built up for something is inverted inside us and suddenly we feel the weight of its absence.

People have described it as a bit like depression.

There's a great book by a guy called Andrew Solomon called The Noonday Demon.

where he says Arcadia basically maps it onto depression.

I think he's right.

It is kind of the medieval language of depression, but it's more than that as well.

It's also burnout.

It's also a sense of directionlessness.

It's completely true.

And actually, yeah, William of Prowda says that sloth is when you take your hand from the plough.