posted September 27, 2013 08:57 AM            

Sehnsucht (pronounced ) is a German noun translated as "longing", "yearning" and "craving", or in a wider sense a type of "intensely missing". However, Sehnsucht is difficult to translate adequately and describes a deep emotional state. Its meaning is somewhat similar to the Portuguese word, saudade. The stage director and author Georg Tabori called Sehnsucht one of those quasi-mystical terms in German for which there is no satisfactory corresponding term in another language. Sehnsucht is a compound word, originating from an ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht). However, these words do not adequately encapsulate the full meaning of their resulting compound, even when considered together.

Sehnsucht took on a particular significance in the work of author C. S. Lewis. Lewis described Sehnsucht as the "inconsolable longing" in the human heart for "we know not what." In the afterword to the third edition of The Pilgrim's Regress he provided examples of what sparked this desire in him particularly:

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.

It is sometimes felt as a longing for a far off country, but not a particular earthly land which we can identify. Furthermore there is something in the experience which suggests this far off country is very familiar and indicative of what we might otherwise call "home". In this sense it is a type of nostalgia, in the original sense of that word. At other times it may seem as a longing for a someone or even a something. But the majority of people who experience it are not conscious of what or who the longed for object may be. Indeed, the longing is of such profundity and intensity that the subject may immediately be only aware of the emotion itself and not cognizant that there is a something longed for. Yet though one may not be able to identify just what it is, the experience is one of such significance that ordinary reality may pale in comparison, as in Walt Whitman's closing lines to "Song of the Universal":

Is it a dream?
Nay but the lack of it the dream,
And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream
And all the world a dream.

The concept of Sehnsucht in Lewis' writings

The key ingredient of the experience, as Lewis treats it, is that this longing—never fulfilled—is itself sweeter than the fulfillment of any other human desire. What evokes it is also so deeply personal that it does not occur to the one feeling it that others would have similar experiences and so is rarely communicated verbally. For most people it is something which cannot be put into words. Indeed the present description of Sehnsucht is itself inadequate and is only suggestive of it. Yet, though difficult to define, Lewis maintained that this is a universal experience.

In The Weight of Glory Lewis says

In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. 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; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. 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 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.
Another feature of Sehnsucht, as we see in the preceding quote, is that one may have the impression that in childhood we were much closer to a grasp of the object of the Sehnsucht-longing whereas now we have only the remembrance of it, or even merely the shadow of a remembrance. There is regret in that we no longer know what we long for, if we ever did. So, for instance, in "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd we hear

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.
In The Problem of Pain, Lewis focuses again on the apparent uniqueness of the object of each person's longing.

You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported . . . All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want . . . which we shall still desire on our deathbeds . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
Thus, any attempt by the artist to evoke Sehnsucht in the viewer is likely to fail. We each may have such a remembrance but that which does the reminding will differ too much from person to person. As the above quote illustrates, Lewis personally identified the true object of Sehnsucht-longing with God and Heaven. As such it is a starting point for the Argument from Desire. It played a central role in his own conversion from atheism to Christianity as is described in the autobiographical Surprised by Joy.

To the reader who grasps Lewis' meaning and identifies Sehnsucht in his own experience it may come as a surprise to find so little explicit discussion of the Sehnsucht experience in other writers (that is, other than those who are discussing Lewis), whether labeled as "Sehnsucht" or not. (an exception is Sigmund Freud , and, arguably, many religious mystics.) On the rare occasions we do find it, the writers, especially poets, will more often convey the experience as personally significant but are seemingly unaware that it is a universal human experience; they describe their experience as if it were unique to them, with no hint that they expect their hearers to recognize similar feelings. For example, Pink Floyd above and the following passage from St. Thérèse de Lisieux's autobiography

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—an abiding dwelling place. I was like Christopher Columbus, whose genius anticipated the discovery of the New World. And suddenly the mists about me have penetrated my very soul and have enveloped me so completely that I cannot even picture to myself this promised country … all has faded away.

posted September 29, 2013 02:39 AM            

There were clues of "home" in reoccuring dreams. A place I've never seen or been to before, yet in the dreams, I know this place well and know that I belong there.

posted September 29, 2013 08:19 AM            

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posted September 29, 2013 10:08 AM            

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9p6mXzBStk

can't remember the lyrics' translation, watched this film a very long time ago with s/t, was something like "whatever there is, even a love most delightful, i am not going there"

I think this feeling is a cultural phenomenon inherent to a very small number of cultures. I used to know people from portugal, they do all admit that a portuguese soul is literally founded on saudade.

the culture within which i grew up also has something similar. plus hey i can't help noticing people from different cultures like i dunno, French or Italian, they don't consider it their organic core, purposeless longing makes them unhappy and uncomfortable.

posted September 29, 2013 10:32 AM            

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posted September 29, 2013 11:20 AM            

More.
http://noweverthen.com/many/saudade.html

This poem gives me such feelings.

quote:

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The Listeners
By Walter De La Mare

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveler's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveler;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveler’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

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posted September 29, 2013 11:52 AM            

i'm very familiar with the Portuguese concept "saudade", and always explained it to people i know with 'hard to explain, nothing like it in English, missing, but not just missing'

anyway about Fado, it definitely is for the soul, not the ears, but the whole thing is about Saudade, not just a verse.

Goes with the history of longing and homesickness for people and moments gone, next to a rolling sea (or so i was told by Portuguese people)

No flashplayer here, but i hope they are the right one's.

Probably the most beautiful cover of this song
"Canção do Mar" Dulce Pontes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_2fyB4dj4U

and
Madredeus "O Pastor"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekIu2vEBXro

you don't need to speak Portuguese as the music and singers voice, says it all. and matches all what the OP about Sehnsucht says! Great topic.