My brother (Ben) recently introduced me to a word...a word that he thought best described Third Culture Kids and I must agree with him.
Sehnsucht (a German word) is very difficult to translate into English but CS Lewis did his best by describing it as:
the "inconsolable longing" in the human heart for "we know not what."
I don't know about you but this Sehnsucht emotion is a frequent visitor of mine, whether it be triggered by something I see on television, walking the streets or it just settles over me with a longing that I find hard to put into words. Best to leave it to Lewis, who clearly didn't struggle to describe this sensation...
"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."
No comments:
Post a Comment