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And this book about “million-dollar babies” has a lot of million-dollar words: etiolated, accidie, budgerigar.

For Ms. Didion, that was not just a literary but a spiritual exercise, conducted in opposition to what she calls the “accidie” — the moral torpor — of the late 1960s.

During the great war the disease of accidie was prevalent in prison camps, as any account of Ruhleben shows very clearly.

Such was the deadly sin of accidie, the name of which is forgotten today, though the thing itself is with us still.

After the sinnes of Envie and of Ire, now wol I speken of the sinne of Accidie.