sehnsucht

Sehnsucht: German, noun

longing, craving, wistfulness, ineffable yearning

“Some psychologists use the word to represent thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences.”

there is a feeling back of the throat 
behind the eyes deep in the gut
it is a surging a tightening a rising
a whisper of kiss on the lips

there is a feeling north of the mountain
down the stream out in the sea
it is a climbing a seeking a cresting
a mist from the waterfall’s dive

there is a feeling carved of the stone
ancient in myths electric in songs
it is a forging a rhyming a joining
a memory woven and waltzed 

there is a feeling
a calling a crying
a longing of wordless intense 
there is a birthright a curse a beacon
a feeling that’s reeling me
home

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I wrote this poem before I’d heard of the word sehnsucht but when I was brushing it up and deciding on a title, it seemed obvious that sehnsucht was what I was getting at.

C. S. Lewis talks about sehnsucht when he recalls the strange moments of joy and longing that eventually led him him to the true myth of the God-Man. In Surprised by Joy, he connects it to a feeling of northernness—his love of Norse legends and windswept landscapes, tales and places that are “cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote,” which were echos or manifestations of his spiritual longing for that which is mysterious and beyond him, a thing or a being worthy of worshipping.

For Lewis, joy and sorrow are intermingled, the ache that beauty arouses. As his character Psyche says in Till We Have Faces, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born.”

And yet the mountain was where the god lived, the Shadowbrute who was rumored to devour his living sacrifices.

I think about that quote all the time—the sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…

Longing is not pleasant. At least, not pleasant unmixed with pain. There is a bitter sharpness to it, a dull and incessant throb. But it can be sweet, even the sweetest thing in our life.

Tolkien, too, wrote about “joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

Once I was on a hike in Scotland called “the hidden valley,” and as we crested the top of a trickling waterfall that had been our guide up the mountain, a huge bowl spilled out before us, a vista of bright grass skirting a crown of snow-scattered peaks. The subtle variations of color in the highlands are unlike any other I’ve seen, and the vast spaciousness was a shock after the slick-rocked crack we’d been pressed in like flowers laid between pages to dry, the scythes of the mountaintops open to the sapphire sky.

I thought, “I could die happy now.”

It was so beautiful that it made up for all the pain I’d experienced and not only that but all the pain that I would experience in the potentially long years to come.

It was so beautiful it hurt.

Back to Lewis: “We do not want merely to see beauty....We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

I felt that there on the mountain—it wasn’t just enough to see such beauty, I wanted somehow to absorb it, to press it into my body and feel physically changed, to—I don’t know. The longing was so intense and yet I couldn’t begin to put words to it (very inconvenient for a writer). If I had to, I guess it would be that I felt sehnsucht.

These are thoughts that are wrapped up in this poem and the idea of sehnsucht for me; I’m not really sure what the point is. Maybe it’s the last line of the poem, and the culmination of Lewis’s story: the joy-ache, the beauty-pain, the ineffable longing we feel—

It can lead us home.

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In Other Words…

goodreads (books)

I’m rereading the Anne of Green Gables series! I probably won’t provide long reviews for them, though, so here’s a longer one I wrote earlier this summer:

Longing to Know by Esther Lightcap Meek (5 stars)

letterboxd (movies)

Just Mercy (4 stars) | Women Talking (4.5 stars)

Happy September!

~ Aberdeen