Joy found in stabs of 'divine homesickness'

A central theme in C.S. Lewis' autobiographical book "Surprised by Joy" — and the obvious source of its title — is what he terms "Joy."

Yet Lewis struggles to convey what he means. "Longing," he calls it, sometimes using the evocative German synonym "Sehnsucht." He describes fleeting instants when, encountering a landscape or phrase or musical passage, he suddenly and unexpectedly "desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described." "It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?" "Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased." Of his earliest such experience, he writes, "It had taken only a moment of time, and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison."

Lewis' first encounters with "Joy" often involved Norse mythology and, eventually, the music of Wagner: "Pure 'Northernness' engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of northern summer, remoteness, severity." Yet he eventually realized that his yearning wasn't really for things Norse and Northern, but for something beyond them.

Joy, in Lewis' sense, is "an unsatisfied desire, which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." Though it resembles them in the sense that "anyone who has experienced it will want it again," it's distinct from happiness and pleasure. Indeed, he describes it as "inconsolable," a "stabbing," a "pang" and a sense of "loss," observing that "it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world." "All Joy reminds," he says. "It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be.'" It always "implies the absence of its object."

When I first read Lewis on "Joy," I knew immediately what he meant.

He wondered whether others shared his experience. I have.

The eminent Austrian-American sociologist Peter Berger regards northern Italy's extraordinarily beautiful Lake Como as the most powerful argument for the existence of God. I would quibble about the specific location, but I understand.