Hi. Chris here. Micha asked me to publish Alysia\u2019s post while she\u2019s at the monastery, but I didn\u2019t listen and published it too soon (big surprise).<\/p>\n
So, rather then getting a post a day, you got two yesterday and none from her today. Sorry!<\/p>\n
After reading Alysia\u2019s post on the Geography of Home I thought of CS Lewis\u2019 essay, The Weight of Glory<\/em>, and how Home is such an elusive notion. Here is the passage in mind.<\/p>\n In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we \u00a0find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost \u00a0committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you\u2014the secret which hurts so much that you take your \u00a0revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; \u00a0the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very \u00a0intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow \u00a0awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and \u00a0cannot tell, though we desire to do both.<\/em><\/p>\n We cannot tell it because it \u00a0is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our \u00a0experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly \u00a0suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a \u00a0name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that \u00a0had settled the matter. <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n Wordsworth\u2019s expedient was to identify it with \u00a0certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth \u00a0had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the \u00a0thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn \u00a0out to be itself a remembering. <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n The books or the music in which we \u00a0thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it \u00a0was not in them, it only came through them, and what came \u00a0through them was longing. These things\u2014the beauty, the memory of our own \u00a0past\u2014are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken \u00a0for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of \u00a0their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the \u00a0scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not \u00a0heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.<\/em><\/p>\n We could do a whole discussion on the German notion of Sehnsucht, or \u201clonging\u201d.<\/p>\n What do you long for? <\/p>\n \n<\/p> \n<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi. Chris here. Micha asked me to publish Alysia\u2019s post while she\u2019s at the monastery, but I didn\u2019t listen and published it too soon (big surprise). So, rather then getting a post a day, you got two yesterday and none from her today. Sorry! After reading Alysia\u2019s post on the Geography of Home I thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":999,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n