C.S. Lewis’ essay “The Thing Itself: What We Long for in Our Existential Longing”
Longing is the cruelest thing that can take away our ability to be present. However, longing is also the most potent creative force we are aware of. All of art, all of science, and even the very fact of life emerged from our longing for meaning, truth, and love, respectively. Although we may refer to this underlying quality of being by different names (Susan Cain refers to it as “the bittersweet,” and the lovely Portuguese word saudade refers to the nebulous, persistent yearning for something or someone beyond the horizon of reality), we recognize it in our bones, in the layers of the soul that are beyond the scope of language.
C.S. Lewis, a philosopher, writer, renowned creator of Narnia, and contemporary mystic, is the only one to have compassionately investigated the paradoxical essence of longing. Lewis, who lived from November 29, 1898, to November 22, 1963, made the statement in a sermon he gave on June 8, 1941, which served as the inspiration for the title of his 1949 collection of addresses, The Weight of Glory (public library).
Lewis, who gave much attention to the meaning of pain and the source of happiness, writes: This desire for our own remote country [is] the secret that stings so badly that you exact revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia, Romanticism, and Adolescence; the secret also pierces with such sweetness that when the mention of it is about to come up in a very private conversation, we become awkward and attempt to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide from you and cannot reveal to you, though you may wish to do both. Because it is a desire for something that has never truly materialised in our experience, we are unable to discern it. Our experience continuously suggests it, so we are unable to conceal it, and we reveal ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. The most typical strategy we use is to categorize it as beautiful and act as though the issue has been resolved. Wordsworth’s strategy was to associate it with specific instances from his own past. But everything here is a lie. When Wordsworth returned to those times in the past, he discovered merely the recollection of the event; what he had remembered turned out to be a remembering in and of itself.
The glowing hint that “the thing itself” is neither something we reach for or anything outside of us but something we are remains when Lewis explores the false nature of these short hands for our longing:
If we put our reliance in the books or the music, we thought contained the beauty, they would disappoint us because the beauty never existed there; it only appeared through them, and what appeared through them was longing. These things, such as beauty and memories of our own past, are accurate representations of what we actually want, but if they are taken to be the actual object, they become stupid idols that cause their devotees to suffer heartbreak. Because they aren’t the actual thing; rather, they are only the aroma of a flower we haven’t discovered, the echo of a song we haven’t heard, or news from a place we haven’t been.
This idea of “the thing itself,” the ultimate object of longing, was rooted in Lewis’s conception of God because he was a devout man. It reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s sublime insight into the nature of art and existence that she had while wandering around her flower garden:
There is no Shakespeare, Beethoven, or God; we are the words, the music, and the thing itself. Behind the cotton wool is a pattern, and the entire world is a work of art.
