Throughout this recent semester of studying abroad, I have continually felt a longing for a home I could not name. It was not the United States I missed, or California, or even my hometown. It was something beyond place. For four months, I struggled to put this paradox of longing into words: the fact was, I missed home, but I didn’t know where home was anymore.
In his poem “Ulysses,” Tennyson reflects on the way travel brings about this longing. He says, “For always roaming with a hungry heart / Much I have seen and known / …. I am a part of all that I have met” (Tennyson, 12-13, 18). Tennyson reflects on the universal human feeling of never quite feeling at home, wherever you are. The more we explore the world, the more this yearning is intensified—it’s like the more you eat, the hungrier you become. You are fulfilled but still long for more you can’t name.
I felt this so many times on the trip. I remember savoring the best cappuccino I have ever had in my life in the Beanhive Cafe in Dublin, surrounded by beautiful people I was only just beginning to know. I remember hiking to the high cliffs of Inishmore Island and looking out at the endless horizon, feeling the gusts of wind tear across my face, looking down at the thundering rage of swirling cerulean ocean, and feeling so beautifully overwhelmed. I remember walking Hadrian’s Wall and glimpsing beyond some misty veil into a realm of imagination, full of ancient cathedrals and holy spaces and candlelight carols at evensong. From the quirkiness of Haworth to the charm of Beatrix Potter’s home in Sawrey, all of these places I traveled to have become a part of who I am.
One of my greatest literary heroes of all time, C.S. Lewis, wrote a lot in his essays about moments when he felt on the verge of discovering some rapturously happy glimpse of a distant world. We all feel this, sometimes without realizing it. It comes to us in different images, always in our souls even if we can’t put a name to it—it was the longing aroused when you stood before the reconciliation statue in Coventry Cathedral, when you crested a mountaintop and saw all of the Lakeland stretch to the horizon, when you read that line of poetry that lingers with you hours after you read it, when the last note of the Irish caeli song fades. It is a memory of a memory, a bittersweet pang of longing—for what, we do not know—but the moment you begin to recognize it, it’s gone. Lewis called it Joy, or more accurately, “sehnsucht,” a German word that translates roughly to inconsolable longing for something we cannot name.
In “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” William Wordsworth describes this same feeling, this time evoked by returning to a place he hadn’t been to in five years. He writes about the feeling of experiencing a place differently because of the company you are with. This struck such a deep chord with me because it captures exactly what I have felt since first arriving in England. That feeling of being with a person in a place and marking that landscape in mind forever, set apart because somewhat that human connection with a person mattered and no matter how you return to that place, or when, or with whom, it will never be the same—it was made more dear for being there with them. Yet there’s still a longing for a moment that you can never return to, like the feeling in your heart when I say the words “it will never be the same.”
Our time studying abroad has been more beautiful than any travel journal or video could ever express. We created memories across Ireland and the United Kingdom. We danced the wobble on the Antrim coast. We went ice skating at Somerset House. We shared conversations about moral relativity and existential crises and the nature of story and Bleak House. The friendships I have made on this trip are the most beautiful I have ever known. In the midst of all of these adventures, we’ve lived our own literary pilgrimage, coming to the places that have shaped the stories we love—and as an extension, have shaped us.
When I think back on all these memories, I wonder if all of this longing for a place is actually a longing to return to that moment, with those people, and the person you were then. Maybe that nostalgia for a home you never had is actually an overwhelming desire for heaven—and maybe all these moments when that homesickness cracked through your soul were actually the moments that God reminded you of where you truly belong.
Think of it this way—the craving for stories suggests the presence of a psychological need that they satisfy. The sensation of hunger proves that humans need to eat, and that we live in a world where food exists. To put it in other words, stories resonate so deeply within us that we return to them repeatedly. Lewis believed that “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 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.”
In all these things, Lewis says, the beauty comes through the the thing; it is not within it. If the longing cannot be satisfied by myths, they must be satisfied by something deeper. “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.” 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. Perhaps then, the reason the United Kingdom has such a dear place in my heart is not the place itself, but because it was a shadow of the true home that I am destined for.
The last five years of my life have been a period where I have sprung into truly becoming myself. Every step of the journey, I felt closer to some vague and uncertain destination. All these little influences—a song that meant the world to me, a book that lingered in my heart after I read the last page, these relationships and conflicts and artistic expressions and places I have encountered, a conversation that echoed of meaning—all of these have culminated, towards what I don’t know. This is my beginning. All my life, I have returned to words. They are my symphony, my violin always ready and tuned to be put to the page.
There is so much beauty in this wide world. There are so many new favorite books to read, meaningful songs to discover, and wonderfully unfamiliar places to see in the world. None of these things will satisfy you—they will only make you more thirsty, but that’s the point. Your longing is a glimpse through a window to another world, one in which your soul will find its true home. We find this Joy in stories, but it is everywhere present in the universe because it is a reminder. It reminds us that this life is not our home.
Yes, my heart aches at the thought of this adventure ending. I’m not sure I know how to return to a normal life, after watching this beautiful dream of studying abroad come true. What do you do when you have lived your dream and are returning to the waking world? What do you do when your favorite story ends?
All I am left with are these thoughts in my head and some scraps of poetry in my notebooks. Maybe all these thoughts will tie each other into a neat little bow by the time I step off the plane in the sunshine state. Maybe in the end, I will come home to the place that shaped me, and know myself for the first time. But for now, here is what I am left with: a mess of miracles, a cornucopia of memories, a stack of polaroids that mean more to me for the moments lived within them—and the people I lived them with.
Goodbye, U.K. I’ll see you again soon.
<3 Olivia Grace
