Sehnsucht and Squirrel Nutkin

As part of my warmups up for being a grandparent, I’ve been scanning my library. I can’t very well read Theo, The Everlasting Man. So I unearthed our Beatrix Potter collection, a wonderful series of small hardcovers that our family wore out when the kids were young. The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin was my favorite. I read it over and over to the kids, sometimes quoting lines from memory.

Much later, I would discover something profound lingering behind the sad tale of the impertinent squirrel.

It was during my reading of Surprised By Joy, the autobiography of C.S. Lewis, that he referenced the sweet children’s story. Lewis was describing his experience of sehnsucht. The word is German and means “longing,” but is almost impossible to translate. It has to do with “desire” and “nostalgia” of the deepest kind. Lewis describes sehnsucht as an “inconsolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.”

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 Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. 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. The second glimpse came through Squirrel Nutkin; through it only, though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books . . . it administered the shock, it was a trouble. It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened; and as before, the experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire (that was impossible – how can one possess Autumn?) but to reawake it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension’ . . . [it was] an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy . . . anyone who has experienced it will want it again . . . 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.

(C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955, 16-18)

Corbin Scott Carnell, author of Bright Shadow of Reality: C.S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect, describes sehnsucht this way:

For many writers it is simply there and they make no attempt to explain it. Some of them – especially poets like Wordsworth and Traherne – have expressed this attitude primarily as an ecstatic desire for union with nature; some have spoken of a “sweet melancholy” which seems to have no cause.

Lewis suggests that the concept of sehnsucht is of “incalculable importance” to the human soul — we long for a far off country, one that, like Moses, we can only glimpse but never enter. Though it defy words and explanation, it is a “sweet melancholy,” an “Idea of Autumn” that lingers behind the “commonplace.”

And what makes this ethereal concept all the more intriguing is that it’s tucked in a children’s story.

I was thinking about that as I blew the dust off the Beatrix Potter books. Isn’t this why we read, go to the movies and wander the art gallery — to “reawaken” sehnsucht? We are looking past the marble, the watercolor, the celluloid and font, for a far off country, a sense of transcendence, a glimpse of Heaven. That it can be found in the most unlikely places — in hospital rooms, handshakes,flower arrangements and fairy tales — makes it all the more unfathomable. One day, Lord willing, I’ll read The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin to a grandson or granddaughter. But behind the rhyme and rustic illustrations, I will trust that something else is stirring, a “sweet melancholy,” an “Idea of Autumn,” a glimpse of a far off country that beckons. . .