Dad spoke German. So did my Aunt. But “I know nothing,” of German, picking up phrases from Hogan’s Heroes and that’s it. But still, I was intrigued and I don’t know why.
“A noun translated as ‘longing,’ ‘yearning’ and ‘craving,'” said the dictionary. “Or, in a wider sense, a type of ‘intensely missing.'”
I gulped. For my whole life, I’ve had an awkward shifting in my soul, a back and forth movement, a stammering to describe something unknowing.
“Sehnsucht is difficult to translate adequately,” the dictionary says. “It describes a deep emotional state.”
Could this actually pinpoint the hollow echo, the sad and distant goodbye, the endless waves that resonate deep within? Or those glimpes and shadows, the knowledge that I could never put my finger on?
C. S. Lewis used the word, calling it the “inconsolable longing in the human heart for we know not what.”
I know this word!
It’s the feeling that I don’t belong, that my home is in a distant land.
It’s the wooing of another world, a place of hope.
It’s the deep question mark that is embedded in everything i do.
I have heard it my whole life!
It’s that nostalgia for places I have never been to.
It’s the love affair of Someone that I’ve never seen
It’s the longing for the longing
The enigma is this — the Germans described something that cannot be described in a word I cannot pronounce. These things shouldn’t be easy. In fact, I never want the full answer. I always want to be on the quest.
There is a distant shore, a place without a name, a destination that I cannot know — until I’ve arrived.
I am not alone, for we have all heard its calling.
Sehnsucht
I hear You.
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