sd#198
 

Sunday Dispatch #198


In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secrets we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But that is all a cheat.

If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past , he would have not found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

These things-the beauty, the memory of our own past-are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken
for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshippers.

For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell?
Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales.
Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.

And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us.


~The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis

I love your threads , i find,em Groud Breaking , Party On :)

Thank You

Though I may never step upon the sands of far off lands, I feel the lives of people all over the world. I touch, feel and reach out to others who would also love unconditionally.

Positive emotions are not lost, they blow within the winds of our world, touching those who would doubt, those who have lost hope, and the hurt and wounded of our times.

Thank you again for your posts.

:)