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While driving home through the country yesterday I was filled with a general sense of pleasant elation at the sight of green woods, flower-filled meadows, and distant hills. This sensation was tinged with a feeling of mystery and wonder and curiosity about what was ahead. I often feel this way in similar settings, and I believe the sensation is a universal one.
There is no clear reason for the sensation. Sadly, it must always be tainted, at least as an adult, by the awareness that there are no undiscovered countries left on Earth. Arcadia does not hide behind the mysterious hills, and driving over them will only bring me to a patch of ugly tract housing on the outskirts of Milton (the city, not the poet).
The experience is universal, and while it does not necessarily defy explanation, the feeling is destroyed by intellectualization. You won’t often hear me say something like that.
The feeling is one that may have been best described by C.S. Lewis in his biography and elsewhere. The German word sehnsucht is sometimes used to describe it. Lewis called it an inconsolable longing for “…that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”
It is not so much a state of being, as a desire for a state of being. You might call it a glimpse of Heaven or even a hint of what it would be to transcend the limitations of ordinary life. Even the most contented of people is sometimes frustrated by his or her own limitations, or the limitations of others. Even the most self-disciplined of us sometimes engages in destructive or hateful behaviour. I think part of sehnsucht is a longing for a world in which one can be one’s best self.
The sensation can be triggered by a landscape, or by a book, or piece of art, or by another person, or music, or whatever, but the sensation is not encapsulated by those things. Possessing them (in whatever form) can even kill the feeling. Building a house with a view of a vista that triggered the feeling when you sighted it while walking by would not grant you access to an inexhaustible store of wonder, but rather simply dull the awe you once felt.
I have to fall back on Lewis again, here, since I’m stuttering a bit.
“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
They are perhaps the “Pennies from Heaven” that Bob Hoskins raved about in that video clip I posted last week, though his character had made the mistake of assuming that pursuing a woman (the sight of whom suddenly filled him with sehnsucht) would allow him to capture the object of his longing.
There is no clear reason for the sensation. Sadly, it must always be tainted, at least as an adult, by the awareness that there are no undiscovered countries left on Earth. Arcadia does not hide behind the mysterious hills, and driving over them will only bring me to a patch of ugly tract housing on the outskirts of Milton (the city, not the poet).
The experience is universal, and while it does not necessarily defy explanation, the feeling is destroyed by intellectualization. You won’t often hear me say something like that.
The feeling is one that may have been best described by C.S. Lewis in his biography and elsewhere. The German word sehnsucht is sometimes used to describe it. Lewis called it an inconsolable longing for “…that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”
It is not so much a state of being, as a desire for a state of being. You might call it a glimpse of Heaven or even a hint of what it would be to transcend the limitations of ordinary life. Even the most contented of people is sometimes frustrated by his or her own limitations, or the limitations of others. Even the most self-disciplined of us sometimes engages in destructive or hateful behaviour. I think part of sehnsucht is a longing for a world in which one can be one’s best self.
The sensation can be triggered by a landscape, or by a book, or piece of art, or by another person, or music, or whatever, but the sensation is not encapsulated by those things. Possessing them (in whatever form) can even kill the feeling. Building a house with a view of a vista that triggered the feeling when you sighted it while walking by would not grant you access to an inexhaustible store of wonder, but rather simply dull the awe you once felt.
I have to fall back on Lewis again, here, since I’m stuttering a bit.
“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
They are perhaps the “Pennies from Heaven” that Bob Hoskins raved about in that video clip I posted last week, though his character had made the mistake of assuming that pursuing a woman (the sight of whom suddenly filled him with sehnsucht) would allow him to capture the object of his longing.
