Sehnsucht
This is a follow-up to last week’s discussion of C. S. Lewis’s concept of “joy:” “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Someone mentioned that there is a German word, sehnsucht, for this longing, and I have been looking around a bit on the web for more information about that. There is a very good discussion of it in the Wikipedia article. A few things worth noting:
“…any attempt by the artist to evoke Sehnsucht in the viewer is likely to fail.” I’m sure this is true. No one can predict what will produce the feeling in anyone else. I’ve tried to remember my first experience of it, and I think it was a moment when I was quite young. I can’t be sure how old I was but I think it must have been no more than six, possibly a couple of years younger. I was holding an Easter basket and looking into it. It was filled with that green cellulose stuff that’s supposed to look like grass (and it did to me). Candy eggs and other Easter things lay in this grass, some buried beneath it. I suddenly saw the basket as a sort of little world and felt a strange pleasure which vanished almost as soon as it was felt. I think there was a sort of oscillation where I had the thought, had the pleasure, lost it, had the thought again, and had the pleasure again. I wanted to be in that little world, but I think it was less the desire to be in it than the thought of it as a little world that gave me the feeling. I remember having similar feelings about a Grandma Moses print that hung in our kitchen. The phrase “green pastures” once gave it to me: obviously my paradise tends to be pastoral.
“…it is a starting point for the Argument from Desire.” The argument from desire is, in a nutshell, the idea that this desire must have an object—or, as Emmylou Harris put it, “If there’s no heaven, what’s this hunger for?” I give this argument much more credit now than I would have when I was younger. As the article says, it’s not by any means a proof in any strict sense. But the counter-argument—that people imagine all sorts of things they can’t have or that don’t exist—seems to miss the essence of sehnsucht: it is not a desire for some particular object available in this world, or at least conceptually available, like, say, a spaceship capable of travel to the stars. The whole nature of it is that you know in the instant that you feel it that nothing in this world can satisfy it. Which of course doesn’t stop a lot of people from trying, going in search of ecstacies (drugs, sex, etc.) that can never satisfy the longing but may kill their ability to feel it and possibly lead them to despair. And it seems to be something we are born with, not something that comes as a sort of extension of natural desires for food and other pleasures; anyone who has felt it knows that it is not at all the same thing as, say, a desire for an unlimited supply of Wild Turkey. It’s difficult to articulate, but it seems to me that there is a real philosophical problem in trying to explain how creatures who are purely a product of this world can have developed this very definite desire for another one.
(By the way I don’t think everything that might be included in the hunger mentioned by Emmylou Harris is sehnsucht; there is a less elusive and more definite sort of desire that points heavenward: for instance, the desire for eternal life, or for the preservation or recovery of things lost in the past.)
Someone else mentioned that St. Therese of Lisieux talks about a longing that seems to be the same or very similar. Wikipedia quotes this passage:
Let me suppose that I had been born in a land of thick fogs, and had never seen the beauties of nature, or a single ray of sunshine, although I had heard of these wonders from my early youth, and knew that the country wherein I dwelt was not my real home—there was another land, unto which I should always look forward. … From the time of my childhood I felt that one day I should be set free from this land of darkness. I believed it, not only because I had been told so by others, but my heart’s most secret and deepest longings assured me that there was in store for me another and more beautiful country.
I don’t think that in itself is sehnsucht, but it may be evidence that she experienced it.
I’m still unsure as to how widespread this phenomenon is; some people seem to recognize it immediately when it’s described, some don’t. In the comments on last week’s piece one or two people took it as referring to the direct experience of God or of God’s love. I envy them that experience, but I’ve never had it; what I recognize in Lewis’s description, and in the Wikipedia discussion, is very definitely a consciousness of something not here, something I want to see and to feel and to know but which is hopelessly distant. I’m certain that what Lewis describes is the same thing I’ve experienced.
Interestingly, my search for sehnsucht on Google turned up several pop music occurrences, most of them German, the most frequent being a song by the German industrial-metal group Rammstein. The words are a bit more sexual than I want to quote here, so I’ll leave it up to the reader to search out the song and the lyrics (which are in German), but here is the crucial part:
Longing hides
like an insect
while asleep you don't notice
that it stings you
I can't be happy anywhere
…
longing is so cruel
One of the reasons I like a lot of music and other art which is on the immediate level hostile to Christianity is that I see sehnsucht at work in it, or that (perhaps) more definite yearning that Emmylou Harris describes. I’m much more in sympathy with those who feel and express the longing, even if they don’t understand it or have any idea where to go to satisfy it, than with those who don’t seem to feel it at all. One example is my favorite heavy metal group, Tristania. I wrote about them last year, here.
Finally, I was reminded of these lines from W. S. Merwin; unfortunately I can’t remember what poem they’re from:
Tell me what you see vanishing
And I will tell you who you are.
Sehnsucht is almost unbearable, but yet it seems better to have experienced it than not, unless one has been fortunate enough to experience instead that to which it points.
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