The Past, and Longing of the Soul

I want to take time today to write about the past. Not necessarily my past, though my past affects who I am and what I write; this past I write of is more the abstract idea of past, and how it should be thought of. Far greater minds have handled this in greater depth than I will ever go into in my entire lifetime, but that will not dissuade me from sharing my thoughts. I cannot tell you what will be the result of these thoughts, much like the astronauts did not know what to expect from the moon by only looking at it. Only by treading on the moon did they feel it and know it more fully. 

No one can escape their past, you cannot run from who you are. The past is the chain and ball shackled around your ankle that you must take with you everywhere you go; some pasts are more burdensome than others, but you are terribly misled if you think you are the only one with baggage, the only person who feels the paralyzing guilt or shame or regret that so often accompanies the past. We seem to go around our world with this suspicion that every person we meet has their world swept and put in order; but there are few thoughts more selfish than thinking that you are the only one who is affected by the curse of history, and many atrocities have occurred as a result of this belief. One example: the French and British were upset at Germany because of the First World War, and being the victors they decided to unfairly force Germany to sign the crippling Versailles treaty, as a result Germany lost its national dignity and pride and turned to Adolf Hitler to bring them back to power, thus starting the Second World War and the Holocaust. Thousands of unnecessary deaths happened because the French and the British thought they were the only ones who had trouble during the First World War. Of course, that is a bit different than the individual past we all face, but it proves the point that others face painfully unforgettable histories as well.

I once wrote, "Linger in the past, but not for long, for the past will tie you down while the future carries you away." This still holds true, and as the older I get the more I realize how much deeper that line goes. It is not wrong to "linger in the past", in fact, I believe it is a necessity to look to the past to find answers. The old apothegm "history repeats itself" implies the past is a valuable teacher to not make the same mistakes our predecessors did. The problem with the past however, is that it is a much like a swamp: the further you go in, the harder it is to find your way out.  "The past will tie you down" explains the enticing power of the past to cloud the mind, blocking off the current surroundings while filling it with visions of the past. In this fog, the mind is kept prisoner, while it slowly decays into a nostalgia and melancholy that is crippling: a potent depression. In The Odyssey, this is portrayed by the Lotus Eaters. In Lord Alfred Tennyson's poem about the Lotus Eaters creatively titled, "The Lotos-Eaters", he writes this line:

"They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, “We will return no more;”
And all at once they sang, “Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

The past will forge in the mind a sweet dream of what used to be, or in this case what could be, but instead of pushing on towards the dream, it seems better to sit and create a fictional world. This is the danger lingering in the past creates, but the worst part may be that time never stops ticking. The future will soon come to present, and if one is caught up in the past then there is no hope of betterment in life. Be careful of nostalgia.

However, the past can sometimes be a golden ray of light to the hopeless wanderer, though this ray of sunshine comes not in light, but in word, one untranslatable German word in particular: sehnsucht.  I am not the first to stumble across this word, and certainly am not the only one to relate to its definition. In what could possibly be the best Wikipedia page ever, it says this:

"Sehnsucht represents thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. It has been referred to as “life’s longings”; or an individual’s search for happiness while coping with the reality of unattainable wishes. Such feelings are usually profound, and tend to be accompanied by both positive and negative feelings. This produces what has often been described as an ambiguous emotional occurrence."

Hebrews 11:13-16 provides in part a Biblical summary of this longing:

"These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city."

This longing is present in every human being, though many are oblivious to this longing. C.S. Lewis is the greatest academic mind responsible for the most, though few, thoughts on sehnsucht, but even he did not fully realize what he had discovered. Sehnsucht describes a longing buried deep beneath the dirt of the daily life and troubles, but there are times when it is felt more than others. I believe it is unearthed for a time when the cold sting of death touches a life near to your heart. I felt this when my father died, and as the years have gone by I realize more and more the power this discovery has. The day my father passed away, I remember laying in my bed for much of the morning, paralyzed. My thoughts were stars dotted across the sky that I could not put into constellations; but as I lay there, I found myself realizing mortality. My grandma and step-grandpa had passed away before my father, so I had seen death's face replace the familiar one in my memories with the one in the coffin, but there was a certain abstractness that shielded my adolescent mind from the full view of death. I was thirteen when I thought about the concept of death and life in depth for the first time, and I assure you it was not the last. In my father's death, part of my soul was exhumed for a time, and I glimpsed into the longing I had for an eternal something possessed by a certain vagueness. I can never know fully what lies behind the shroud of this great mystery while I walk the earth, but I will never stop trying to knowing this mystery more.
I find sehnsucht in life every so often, because there are some things that are such a part of me that for a short time I find myself thinking of a far-off country, one where I know I belong. I hear it in the violin piece of Vivaldi's Spring, I see it as the snowflakes fall thickly in the cold morning air and land softly on the pure powdered ground, when I see a father put a hand on his young son's shoulder and drawing his son nearer says that he is proud of him, the soft crunch of the leaves underfoot as the scent and smoke of the campfire drifts away in the wind, reading George Gray by Edgar Lee Masters, recalling a storm lazily float across the sky of Montego Bay as I watched from a distant mountaintop, and when reading Frodo's soliloquy at the end of The Return of the King. This longing reaches each and every sense of the body, and at times will make me quake and weep as my soul shakes off more and more dirt revealing more of the yearning I have for a land so close, yet so far away.

Sehnsucht belongs to every human, but many do not understand what it truly means, even in simple terms. There are pieces of the past that are important to this desire, and there are things yet to come that will make us realize it more. C.S. Lewis put it this way in "The Problem with Pain",

  "All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want . . . which we shall still desire on our deathbeds . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand." 

As a reader, you cannot understand my sehnsucht like I can, because it was made for me, but I urge you to seek your own longings in your life. Write them down, tell them out loud, and maybe they might provide you more comfort, or maybe they will cause only more longing. Just always remember: linger in the past, but not for long, for the past will tie you down while the future carries you away.