The first time I remember feeling it, I was a child growing up in Minnesota. The end of winter in that still, gelid land was almost a religious experience. It overwhelmed me and sent me yearning for some kind of ultimate connection I could not name.
To satisfy the yearning, I developed a ritual. The rains would come, and Minnesota’s many lakes would begin to thaw, their tributaries transformed into crackling foretellers of a frozen world returned to motion. When the temperature was warm enough to stand it, I’d run to a neighborhood pond fed by little rivulets and tap on the ice in the shallow end. It would break like the shell of a creme brûlée and I’d stick my feet in the sandy mud that swirled beneath. It hurt, of course. It was so cold. But it felt good, too. I made myself stay there for as long as I could stand it—squishing the mud between my toes, swaying to the tympanic sounds of the lake waking up.
On March 1st, we enter “meteorological spring,” the date at which the weather starts to transform into that lurching progress toward longer, warmer days that we call spring. This year, March 1st was a rainy, relatively warm day—one that should have felt like a release from the interminable gloom of February. But spring breeds its own pathos. It surfaces something inside me—an ache, an exquisite agony that can only be quenched by doing something insane like sticking my feet beneath the surface of a still-frozen lake.
Unfortunately, Manhattan’s gutters are a sordid site for such ablutions. “The ache” is a sense of longing, but for what, I don’t know. I feel it most at liminal moments—spring and fall; evening and dawn; just after departing, but before arriving; and I associate it with adolescence, that most liminal moment of life, when we stand at the cusp of adulthood.
This year the ache seems more painful, perhaps because a city in lockdown offers limited outlets. Perhaps because coupled with Manhattan’s usual frenzy of spring fever is the sense that we may soon be out of the shadow of the virus. There were the before-times, there is the present, and just ahead, the threshold of the future.
Of course the Germans have a word for it: Sehnsucht. Translated in English, it means “longing,” “desire,” “yearning,” or “craving.”
But it’s deeper than that. Poets and people of faith, including Goethe and C.S. Lewis, have long circled the subject. It is a wish for something more—a sense that perfection exists, somewhere out there, and it’s linked with a parallel sense that this perfection can never be possessed or even beheld. It’s marked by ambivalent, bittersweet emotions. It’s a cousin of nostalgia, but rather than look back, it gathers the past, present, and future of one’s life together to yield symbolic richness, even as it fails to satisfy.
It is desire, but C.S. Lewis distinguishes it from other desires based on two characteristics:
“In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat.
But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.
This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognize the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated [. . .].
For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having. To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.”
C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical
Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism
I have been that subject crying out for her lost youth. About six years ago, I lost all sense of Sensucht. I felt numb; there was nothing in the world that I desired. I wrote in my journal, “The wanting is what I miss most.”
I’m not sure by what alchemy it returned. I tried everything from the practical to the pharmaceutical to lift myself from the depression that had descended. And then one day, as I was walking through the Upper West Side Community Garden on my way to work, I spied little green shoots poking through the dirt—nascent tulips—and the old familiar ache returned. I lived inside that exquisite agony for awhile until it subsided, allowing me to enjoy life again, and resurfacing only now and then, when the sun shines through the trees a certain way, or when the scent of a bonfire beckons on the breeze, or when I happen to catch the clock in the act of shifting from one minute to the next.
Now I see that while the yoga and antidepressants may have helped, it was the wanting that saved me. The wanting was with me all along.
Some say that Sehnsucht is nostalgia for a future that will never exist, for a utopia we’ll never know, for Aslan’s Land, where, though high in the mountains of Narnia, it never snows. As we move toward what is hopefully the end of this pandemic, I can’t help but feel a yearning for a more perfect future—the one in which we learn and grow from our mistakes, renew ourselves on a foundation of mutual aid, and come together, not always to agree, but to at least cooperate.
Sometimes I catch glimpses of this Eden, as when I behold a city of over 8 million people mostly acting in solidarity with one another by wearing masks, practicing social distancing, and staying indoors when we’re told. Or while listening to Amanda Gorman, who shared her gorgeous vision for a new United States with us at Biden’s inauguration. Those glimpses inspire Sehnsucht’s strange blend of hope and despair; the knowledge that the wanting will never be satisfied, but it can still point the way.
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” — C.S. Lewis
PS: Sensucht is also the name of a 1997 album by the German metal band Rammstein. This album was once the bane of my existence. My brother insisted on playing it on the way to high school, whenever it was his day to choose the music. Could it be that in our epic battles for control of the CD player, Patrick and I were fighting to experience the same feeling?
On my days, we listened to The Smiths. Too bad Morrissey turned out to be such a fascist.
Laura Linart 