Nothing kidnaps our capability for presence extra cruelly than longing. And but longing can also be essentially the most highly effective artistic pressure we all know: Out of our eager for that means got here all of artwork; out of our eager for reality all of science; out of our eager for love the actual fact of life. We could give this undertone of being totally different names — Susan Cain calls it “the bittersweet” and Portuguese has the stunning phrase saudade: the obscure, fixed eager for one thing or somebody past the horizon of actuality — however we acknowledge it in our marrow, within the strata of the soul past the attain of phrases.
Nobody has explored the paradoxical nature of longing extra sensitively than the thinker, storyteller, beloved Narnia creator, and trendy mystic C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) in a sermon he delivered on June 8, 1941, which later lent its title to his 1949 assortment of addresses The Weight of Glory (public library).
Lewis — who thought deeply about the significance of suffering and the secret of happiness — writes:
This want for our personal far off nation [is] the key which hurts a lot that you just take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the key additionally which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate dialog, the point out of it turns into imminent, we develop awkward and have an effect on to snicker at ourselves; the key we can not conceal and can’t inform, although we want to do each. We can not inform it as a result of it’s a want for one thing that has by no means really appeared in our expertise. We can not conceal it as a result of our expertise is consistently suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers on the point out of a reputation. Our commonest expedient is to name it magnificence and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to establish it with sure moments in his personal previous. However all this can be a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone again to these moments up to now, he wouldn’t have discovered the factor itself, however solely the reminder of it; what he remembered would grow to be itself a remembering.
As Lewis considers the illusory nature of those shorthands for our longing, we’re left with the radiant intimation that “the factor itself” isn’t one thing we attain for, one thing past us, however one thing we’re:
The books or the music by which we thought the sweetness was positioned will betray us if we belief to them; it was not in them, it solely got here by means of them, and what got here by means of them was longing. This stuff — the sweetness, the reminiscence of our personal previous — are good pictures of what we actually want; but when they’re mistaken for the factor itself they flip into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they aren’t the factor itself; they’re solely the scent of a flower we now have not discovered, the echo of a tune we now have not heard, information from a rustic we now have by no means visited.
For Lewis, who was spiritual, this notion of “the factor itself” — the last word object of longing — was anchored in his understanding of God. For me, it calls to thoughts Virginia Woolf’s exquisite epiphany about the meaning of art and life, discovered whereas strolling by means of her flower-garden:
Behind the cotton wool is hidden a sample… the entire world is a murals… there isn’t any Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we’re the phrases; we’re the music; we’re the factor itself.
