In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness… I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence … We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. 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 hearts of their worshipers. 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.
– CS Lewis, Weight of Glory
Blaue Blume / Langtans Blaa Blomma (Blue Flower of Longing) from wooden flower arrangement from recent local Octoberfest vendor;
Wanderer on the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818, German Romantic
The Anglo-Saxon World Anthology: Oxford Classics
Often the wanderer pleads for pity / and mercy from the Lord; but for a long time Sad in mind, he must dip his oars / into icy waters, the lanes of the sea He must follow the paths of exile: fate is inflexible – The Wanderer (Anglo-Saxon poem)
Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C.S. Lewis by Corbin Scott Carnell, Eerdmans, 1974
