Amanda DeSalme-Art and Longing

I was thinking about what was said in class on Wednesday about art and longing and decided to read more about what C.S. Lewis meant when talking about "Sehnsucht." From my understanding C.S. Lewis linked longing strangely enough to joy. I initially found this to be odd because Buddhists describe desire as the cause of all suffering, and strive to rid themselves of all desire. This makes sense in terms of tangible things, because objects are fleeting and cannot possibly make one truly happy eternally. But C.S. Lewis described a different kind of desire, a longing to come back to something transcendent that we can never really reach. He claimed that joy came through "blissful glimpses God sends to an estranged race to awaken sweet desire of pagans and thereby calling them to Himself."
C.S. Lewis also defined "joy" as the highest, purest sense of imagination, or a sense of awe at the realization of Absolute Truth. It is through art that humans try to convey this Absolute Truth, to awaken desire, to try with all our might to re-connect ourselves with that "Holy Other." As I reflect on Lewis' thoughts on these matters I recall emotions I have experienced when encountering beauty. Emotions that are so hard to put into words, poets and musicians and painters all try to communicate it and never really say it all. It is a constant longing that hurts in such a way that we feel joyous, to be coming into contact with anything at all. We feel a strange sense of ecstasy in knowing that we aren't quite there but we've got a blissful glimpse of it. I feel this way when moved by a particular piece of music, or witnessing a brilliant sunset, or coming across a poem that jars me into feeling something. And always afterwards there is the desire to have contact again. It is the reason I play a song over and over again, or read a poem again and again, or fumble for my camera to try and capture the radiant rays of the sun, still knowing that the picture won't suffice the next time around. The second listen of the song won't have quite as sweet of an effect on me as the first time I realized it had gripped me. The poem won't jar me as it did the first time. But I still feel joy in the quest to re-connect, to give the song another listen or to continue searching for more things to take me by surprise.

btw- I chose to put up an image of Claude Monet's "Water Lilies" simply because he was the first painter I was captivated by as a small child. I loved his lush scenes of bridges with flowers dripping from them and placid lily pads on a lake.