“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
C.S. Lewis
Have you ever felt a boundless sensation of longing, a feeling like a siren’s song in the distance? It sweeps over you when you look at a vast landscape or recall a memory of a memory; it’s like being in a dream and hearing an echo of the real world far away. The desire elicits a bittersweet pang of longing for something distant, and then it is gone—vanished—just as it is recognized. We call it nostalgia. We call it heartache. C.S. Lewis, who spent his life chasing the meaning of this feeling, called it “sehnsucht,” a German word for the “incosolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.”
Lewis’s experience with “sehnsucht” began at a young age. His Belfast childhood was surrounded with glens and meadows, the crash of waves in the Irish sea, and the vast Antrim mountains dissolving in the horizon.
Throughout his early years, he would feel sometimes on the verge of discovering a rapturously happy glimpse of an otherworld. Lewis decided at once to make this his lifelong quest: to seek this mysterious Joy in every manifestation and record it in order to better understand it.
One day, as a young adult, Lewis read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Tegner’s Drapa and encountered these lines:
“I heard a voice, that cried
‘Balder the beautiful
is dead, is dead!’
And through the misty air
Passed like the mournful cry
Of sunward sailing cranes.”
Instantly, the wild dream of these words opened a passage to a realm beyond; of empty northern skies, an open landscape, of things passing beyond reach, the grandiosity of gods and giants and the realms of Asgard. These things seemed to crystallize the sense of longing he’d felt as a childhood. In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, Lewis later wrote this:
“There arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss.”
C.S. Lewis, (Surprised by Joy, ch. 5)
When he explored Norse mythology further, he found the same longing was aroused from the ancient myths—and more than being simply in myths, it was imbued in all stories that rang true to his soul. It was the fundamental truth of honorable men combatting great evil, the dawning of the light through the dark, the epic struggle of good and evil.
During his years as an Oxford professor, Lewis became good friends with fellow professors J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. One evening, they fell to discussing myths, and their relation to truth. In his diary, Lewis summarized Tolkien’s argument like this: if anyone encountered the idea of a god dying in sacrifice in any Pagan story, he confessed to like it and was mysteriously moved. However, if he had discovered the same thing in the Gospels, it would not ring as true.
“The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant.’ Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”
Just as the sensation of hunger proves that humans need to eat, and that we live in a world where food exists, Lewis argued that the craving for myths suggested the presence of a physiological need that they satisfy. To put it in other words, myths touch something deep within us, so we return to them repeatedly. However, the Joy is not in these landscapes and books and music, it only comes through them.
“These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire,” Lewis wrote in his essay The Weight of Glory, “but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the heart 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.”
This “Joy” or “sehnsucht” is something we all experience, perhaps without realizing it. From the dawn of time, God has manifested himself everywhere, leaving traces of His glory in the skies and the breeze and the sunlight. It comes to us in different images, always in our souls even if we can’t put a name to it: the music that brings us to tears, beauty and truth that hurts our souls, the infinite cathedral of the starry night sky, the story of sacrifice and heroism that whispers truth to our souls, the comfort and longing for home, the enormity of the ancient world, the universe that is whole and beautiful and teeming with life.
In The Weight of Glory, Lewis explains that “if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us.” That desire is Joy.
It is a glimpse of heaven, a signpost that points home. It exists to remind us that “there are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” It’s true that Heaven awaits us in eternity, but it is also “in the hearts of man” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). These stings of sehnsucht remind us that this earth is not our home. Living here, in even the most beautiful sunsets and misty mountains and acoustic music, we see only shadowy echoes of heaven’s true beauty.
In those fleeting glimpses, we see what this world could be. When our true home is found, we will recognize it at once. In the Last Battle, the final story in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a character exclaims, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it until now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that is sometimes looked a little like this.”
Sehnsucht is a glimpse through a window to another world—one in which your soul would be at home. For C.S. Lewis, this longing was evoked by myths and stories, but it is everywhere present in the world because it is a reminder. It reminds us that this life is not our home; we were made to belong in a distant land at the dawn of infinity.
<3 Olivia Grace
