Longing

One of my book groups is reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Right out of the gate in the introduction was the line "The greatest happiness is to be found in longing." (The Autobiography of Goethe) I disagreed with it, remembering CS Lewis's take on the statement "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive."  If there were never any arrivals, then there would never be any hopeful travel.  That seems logically very solid to me. I never much thought about it again.

But with my long Nostalgia Destruction Tour, long after the final result was inevitable, still I kept on, making sure - as with Pooh and Hunny Pot - that is was going to be a disappointment right the way down. I used words like nostalgia and reverie to describe it, but the words longing or yearning did not occur to me. This time it jumped out at me.  I do enjoy longing - not to the extent that Werther or even Goethe did, but I recognised the idea. With nostalgia now discredited in my heart, I find that I long for something to long for.  I like the thing itself. I have harbored an opposition to longing, suspecting that it is unhealthy.  I associate it with whining. Yet the Psalms describe longing for the Lord, and Jesus tells his disciples that prophets longed to see the days they are seeing now.  Even more, Jesus himself tells Jerusalem that he has longed to gather it as a hen gathers her chicks. So longing cannot be entirely unhealthy or forbidden. Longing for longing may not qualify.

 

When I first heard "Take Me For Longing" by Alison Krauss it irritated me.  No, you silly girl, you want to be loved for your good qualities, your kindness and faithfulness. Any beagle can long for you. Don't encourage other women to think this way. Spoken like a longtime husband and a father of sons. Nor do all young people want to be yearned for. It seems to make a fair number of people nervous. But some are built for longing, and some hope to be longed for. I had forgotten that. It's dangerous stuff, but when I related it to my own longing I get it. There is a pleasure in it. A dangerous pleasure, but not necessarily a forbidden one.

If you worry that your longing is inordinate, reading The Sorrows of Young Werther may be the cure of it. He longs for nature, he longs for greatness of soul, and mostly, he longs for Lotte, a betrothed woman whose fiance he loves almost equally.  I have always tried to limit my exclamation points and tried not to gush. Werther revels in it.  

When I first came here and looked down into that lovely valley from the hill, the way the entire scene charmed me was a marvel. —That little wood!—Ah, if only you might walk in its shade!—That mountain-top!—Ah, to view this vast landscape from there!—And the chain of hills, and the gentle valleys!—Oh, to lose myself amongst them!—And I hastened there, and returned without having found what I was hoping for. Oh, distance is like the future: before our souls lies an entire and dusky vastness which overwhelms our feelings as it overwhelms our eyes, and ah! we long to surrender the whole of our being, and be filled with all the joy of one single, immense, magnificent emotion.—And then, ah! once we hasten onwards, and what lay ahead becomes the here and now, everything is just as it was, and there we are, as poor and confined as ever, our souls longing for the elusive balm. In the same way, the most restless of travellers ends up pining for his homeland once again, and discovers in his cottage, in the arms of his wife and amidst his children, and in the labours that are necessary to support them, that joy he sought in vain in the wide world.

Just stuff it, willya?  Who asked you? You're acting like a poodle trying to hump someone's leg. I find it hard to believe he was such an inspiration to the young of Europe in the 18th. They must have been longing for Romanticism pretty badly. It was hard through much of the book to take seriously that Lotte might ever consider being in love with him, or that her boyfriend then husband admired Werther so greatly that he let him hang around. But then Lotte goes into a little speech of her own at the end and she's just the same, perhaps dialed down only 10%. 

A canary flew oʃ the mirror and perched on her shoulder.—‘A new friend,’ she said, coaxing it onto her hand, ‘which I got for the children. Isn’t he a dear? Look at him! If I give him some bread he flutters his wings and pecks oh-so-daintily. He kisses me too: watch!’
She held the little creature to her mouth and lovingly pressed it to her sweet lips, as if it were capable of feeling the bliss it was enjoying.
‘He shall kiss you too,’ she said, and held the bird towards me.—Its little beak moved from her mouth to mine, and when it touched me with a peck it was like a breath of love, a promise of pleasure to come.
‘His kiss,’ I said, ‘is not wholly free of a desire; he wants food, and these empty endearments leave him dissatisfied.’
‘He will eat out of my mouth, too,’ she said.—She offered it a few crumbs on her lips, and smiled with all the joyful happiness of innocent and loving fellow-feeling. 

It just seems it would be hard to wake up to a wife like that every morning. 

She does make a wise observation near the end, as Werther grows madder and rushes toward suicide.  

I fear, I very much fear that what makes the desire to possess me so attractive is its very impossibility.’ 

 Exactly.

Over the last few letters Werther becomes completely unraveled, unable to contain his emotions. His last missive is a fevered, overwrought riffing on the poet Ossian. It wasn't the real Ossian (Oisin) of course, but a Scottish poet claiming to translate/channel/interpret the Celtic bard. It is long minutes of listening to our hero clutch and breast, wail and bury his face in his hands. It reminded me of an angrier explosion of emotion in Chap 9 of The Great Divorce.

...come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs, the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the "haves," what they thought of them  

Werther believes he has a great soul but has only a shallow one, crabbed and deprived of air. There is no room for anything but longing. A very good cautionary tale for the nostalgic to keep in mind.