I meander between different genres of lit--lit which often happens to be from days of yore--and enjoy posting from many of said meanderings.
Posts tagged sehnsucht
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise […] There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.
‘That’s the matter with all of us. We’re too busy to wake up.’
‘Well,’ said the girl solidly, ‘what is there to wake up to?’
‘There must be!’ cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular excitement—‘there must be something to wake up to! All we do is preparations—your cleanliness, and my healthiness, and Warner’s scientific appliances. We’re always preparing for something—something that never comes off. I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house; but what is going to HAPPEN in the house?’
She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes, and seemed to be searching for some form of words which she could not find.
No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.
Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like drunk men, know not the road home.
This every soul seeketh and for the sake of this doth all her actions, having an inkling that it is; but what it is she cannot sufficiently discern, and she knoweth not her way, and concerning this she hath no constant assurance.
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.
The short span of sixty years can never shut in the whole of man’s imagination; the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy his heart.
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.
All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’
The life of man entire is misery: he finds no resting place, no haven from calamity. But something other dearer still than life the darkness hides and mist encompasses; we are proved luckless lovers of this thing that glitters.
