Simone Weil:
The love we feel for the splendor of the heavens, the plains, the sea, and the mountains, for the silence of nature which is borne in upon us by thousands of tiny sounds, for the breath of the winds or the warmth of the sun, this love of which every human being has at least an inkling, is an incomplete, painful love, because it is felt for things incapable of responding, that is to say for matter. Men want to turn this same love toward a being who is like themselves and capable of answering to their love, of saying yes, of surrendering. When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.
This kind of transference is what all love literature expresses, from the most ancient and well-worn metaphors and comparisons to the subtle analyses of Proust.
The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation. It is mistaken if it thinks it is anything else. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it.
(Simone Weil, Waiting For God, trans. Emma Craufurd, [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951], “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” §. Love of the Order of the World, p. 171.)
Max Lucado:
Tucked away in each of us is a hunch that we were made for forever and a hope that the hunch is true.
(Max Lucado, It’s Not About Me: Rescue from the Life We Thought Would Make Us Happy, [Nashville: Integrity Publishers, 2004], p. 53.)
C. S. Lewis:
…that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves?
(C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979], Preface, pp. 9-10.)
C. S. Lewis:
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.
(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, [London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2002], p. 135.)
Cf. Michael J. Christensen:
Sehnsucht, or immortal longing . . . is that mysterious something we all want, we all grasp at, “in the first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.” Its purpose in human experience . . . is to point us to the Source of our desire. …The fact that the best of life’s pleasures are really only half-pleasures, compared to the imagined ideal, is God’s way of giving us a taste of what heaven is like, a thirst for our true home. Sehnsucht, as Corbin Scott Carnell personifies it, is “the hound of heaven, relentlessly pursuing man that he may discover his true identity and home.”
(Michael J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture: His Thoughts on the Nature of Biblical Inspiration, the Role of Revelation, and the Question of Inerrancy, [Waco: Word Books, 1979], pp. 71-72.)
Alister E. McGrath:
Human desire, the deep and bitter-sweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points beyond finite objects and finite persons (who seem able to fulfil this desire, yet eventually prove incapable of doing so); it points through these objects, and persons towards their real goal and fulfilment in God himself.
A similar pattern is observed with human personal relationships. In love, perhaps the deepest human relationship of all, we encounter the strange longing to lose ourselves in another – to enter into a relationship which paradoxically simultaneously heightens and obliterates our own identity. Yet even love, which seems to offer all, delivers less than it seems to promise. Somehow in personal relationships there is to be found a bitter-sweet longing – something which comes through the relationship, but is not actually in that relationship.
…It is as if human love points to something beyond it, as a parable. The paradox of hedonism – the simple, yet stultifying, fact that pleasure cannot satisfy – is another instance of this curious phenomenon. Pleasure, beauty, personal relationships; all seem to promise so much, and yet when we grasp them, we find that what we were seeking was not located in them, but lies beyond them. There is a ‘divine dissatisfaction’ within human experience, which prompts us to ask whether there is anything which may satisfy the human quest to fulfil the desires of the human heart.
(Alister E. McGrath, A Cloud of Witnesses: Ten Great Christian Thinkers, [Grand Rapids: ZondervanPublishingHouse, 1990], pp. 128, 128-129.)
Waugh Evelyn:
…perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.
(Waugh Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited: Third Edition, [London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1945], p. 265.)
C. S. Lewis:
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 secret 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 actually 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 had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have 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 not 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 their worshipers. 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 visited.
(C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory;” In: C. S. Lewis, They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses, [London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962], p. 200.)
Rebecca Manley Pippert:
People have two things in common: We all want to be happy and we all want to be loved. And we cannot understand why something so simple should be so difficult. In fact, we may not even be able to articulate what we feel we desire and yet miss. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “You don’t know quite what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache you want it so.”
Part of the ache comes from the fact that in spite of the glut of the mundane and the ugly, somehow we know we were made for something more. Something more seemed promised. There is more for us to live for, to embrace or to be embraced by. We are surely here to participate in something wider and deeper than we have yet realized. We want to know that our lives are significant, that it will make a difference that we have been here. So with the best of intentions we feverishly pursue happiness and significance, love and understanding. Is that too much to ask? Yet something blocks us from achieving such a reasonable goal.
…We know it’s not the superficial, bubbly kind of happiness for which we long, the kind that would perhaps have satisfied us in our youth. We are wistful for something deeper that will satisfy our longing. But what is it that we want and how on earth are we to reach it? We sense that something is missing, even that something is wrong with us, but what it is we are not quite sure. And in times like our own, when the gap between ideals and conduct has grown so wide, that desire becomes all the more poignant.
(Rebecca Manley Pippert, Hope Has Its Reasons: The Search to Satisfy Our Deepest Longings: Revised Edition, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001], pp. 13-14, 14.)
C. S. Lewis:
On the other hand it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness and beauty, beyond their own resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague something’ which has been suggested to ones mind as desirable, all ones life, in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris, and which rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy, can be argued not to be any product of our own minds. Of course I am not suggesting that these vague ideas of something we want and haven’t got, wh. occur in the Pagan period of individuals and of races (hence mythology) are anything more than the first and most rudimentary forms of the ‘idea of God’.
(C. S. Lewis, Letter, “To His Brother (W),” [Magdalen College], Oct. 24th 1931; In: The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Volume II, ed. Walter Hooper, [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004], pp. 7-8.)
C. S. Lewis:
Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.
(C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, [London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, 1990], p. 145.)
Alister E. McGrath:
…if certain ideas in our minds cannot be accounted for on the basis of our experience of the world, they must be accounted for in terms of something beyond that world. The apparently ‘real’ world must be supplemented by another world, an ‘imagined world’ – not in the sense of an invented world, but a real world into which we must enter by our imagination.
(Alister E. McGrath, A Cloud of Witnesses: Ten Great Christian Thinkers, [Grand Rapids: ZondervanPublishingHouse, 1990], p. 131.)
Peter Kreeft:
What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a picture of heaven, a silhouette of heaven, a heaven-shaped shadow, a longing unsatisfiable by anything on earth.
(Peter Kreeft, Heaven, The Heart’s Deepest Longing: Expanded Edition, [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989], pp. 34-35.)
Peter Kreeft:
The major premise of the argument is that every natural or innate desire in us bespeaks a corresponding real object that can satisfy the desire.
The minor premise is that there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature, can satisfy.
The conclusion is that there exists something outside of time, earth, and creatures which can satisfy this desire.
(Peter Kreeft, Heaven, The Heart’s Deepest Longing: Expanded Edition, [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989], pp. 201-202.)
Richard Holloway:
This is my dilemma: I am dust and ashes, frail and wayward, a set of predetermined behavioural responses programmed by my genetic inheritance and social context, riddled with fears, beset with needs the origins of which I do not understand and whose satisfaction I cannot achieve, quintessence of dust, and unto dust I shall return. Who can expect much of that? However, there is something else in me; there is an awareness that, truly, I am not what I am; and what I am not is what I truly am. Dust I may be, but troubled dust, dust that dreams, dust that has strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a destiny prepared, an inheritance that one day will be my own. How else can we account for all the fairy tales, what C. S. Lewis called the ‘good dreams’, that characterize our history? All those paupers who were really princes; all those kitchen maids who were really the king’s true love; all those ugly ducklings who were majestic swans; all that glory rising from cinders and ashes. So, my life is stretched out in a painful dialectic between ashes and glory, between weakness and transfiguration. I am a riddle to myself, an exasperating enigma, ‘a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways’. I am like the man in the old Jewish proverb who had two texts in his pockets, one telling him he was dust and ashes and the other that for him the whole of the world was made. This strange duality of dust and glory…
(Richard Holloway, The Stranger in the Wings: Affirming Faith in a God of Surprises, [London: SPCK, 1994], pp. 138-139.)
Blaise Pascal:
The greatness of man is so evident, that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature we call in man wretchedness; by which we recognise that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.
For who is unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king? …Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no man ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes. But any one is inconsolable at having none.
(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Everyman’s Library, No. 874, trans. W. F. Trotter, [London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1943], n. 409, p. 109.) See also: ccel.org.
Cf. Rebecca Manley Pippert:
So while it is true that we are insecure, we also know that we are. And in the gap between what we experience and what we long for is a hint, an intuition and a signal of some truth beyond.
(Rebecca Manley Pippert, Hope Has Its Reasons: The Search to Satisfy Our Deepest Longings: Revised Edition, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001], p. 48.)
Cf. Gilbert K. Chesterton:
That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes.
(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, [New York: John Lane Company, 1909], pp. 266-267.)
Herman Bavinck:
Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place. They seek Him down below, and He is up above. They seek Him on the earth, and He is in heaven. They seek Him afar, and He is nearby. They seek Him in money, in property, in fame, in power, and in passion; and He is to be found in the high and the holy places, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isa. 57:15). But they do seek Him, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him (Acts 17:27). They seek Him and at the same time they flee Him. They have no interest in a knowledge of His ways, and yet they cannot do without Him. They feel themselves attracted to God and at the same time repelled by Him.
In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa. 29:8).
(Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, trans. Henry Zylstra, [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1956], pp. 22-23.)
Ovid:
And whilst other animals look downwards upon the earth, he gave to man a lofty face, and ordered him to look at heaven, and lift his countenance upright towards the stars.
(P. Ovidii Nasonis, METAMORPHOSEΩN LIBRI: The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. George B. Wheeler, [London: William Allen, 1851], Bk. 1, Sec. 2, p. 3. Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.85 [Loeb Classical Library, 42:8, 9].)
Ovid: (alternative translation)
And, though all other animals are prone, and fix their gaze upon the earth, he gave to man an uplifted face and bade him stand erect and turn his eyes to heaven.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.85; The Loeb Classical Library: Ovid: Metamorphoses: In Two Volumes: I: Books I-VIII, LCL Vol. 42, trans. Frank Justus Miller, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951], pp. 8, 9.)
C. S. Lewis:
…there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to “enormous”) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. Ἰοῦλίανποθῶ—and 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.
…in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, 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. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.
(C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, [New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1955], pp. 14, 15-16.)
John R. W. Stott:
But, as we investigate this claim, two immediate objections are likely to be raised. The first is that Jesus Christ is evidently a crutch. “He’s fine,” people say, “for lame dogs who need a helping hand, but for able-bodied, strong-minded people who can manage on their own, he is entirely superfluous.”
I begin my response by agreeing with the criticism. Jesus Christ is indeed a crutch for the lame, to help us walk upright, just as he is also medicine for the spiritually sick, bread for the hungry and water for the thirsty. We do not deny this; it is perfectly true. But then all human beings are lame, sick, hungry and thirsty. The only difference between us is not that some are needy, while others are not. It is rather that some know and acknowledge their need, while others either don’t through ignorance or won’t through pride.
The second objection that is sometimes raised is that Jesus Christ is evidently a fiction of our own mind. Some people put it like this, “The belief that Jesus Christ meets our human needs gives the game away. He’s nothing more than a figment of your imagination. You feel unloved and unwanted; so you create your own heavenly father figure. You feel spiritually hungry; so you invent Jesus Christ as the bread of life.”
My response to this second objection is that the argument lacks logic. Does the fact that food satisfies our physical hunger make us suspicious of food? Does the fact that love brings us a sense of wellbeing rouse our suspicions about love? Then why should the fact that Christ fulfills our human aspirations rouse our suspicions about Christ? No, the correspondence between our aspirations and their fulfillment in Christ is due not to a fantasy of our own minds but to a reality that God has established.
(John Stott, Why I Am a Christian, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004], pp. 95-97.)
C. S. Lewis:
Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the: inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation, And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.
(C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory;” In: C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes a Toast: And Other Pieces, [London and Glasgow: Collins, 1965], p. 106.)
C. S. Lewis:
And this brings me to the other sense of glory—glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.
(C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory;” In: C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses, [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949], pp. 12-13.)
George MacDonald:
In moments of doubt I cry,
“Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?”
“Whence then came thy dream?” answers Hope.
“Out of my dark self, into the light of my consciousness.”
“But whence first into thy dark self?” rejoins Hope.
“My brain was its mother, and the fever in my blood its father.”
“Say rather,” suggests Hope, “thy brain was the violin whence it issued, and the fever in thy blood the bow that drew it forth.—But who made the violin? and who guided the bow across its strings? Say rather, again—who set the song birds each on its bough in the tree of life, and startled each in its order from its perch? Whence came the fantasia? and whence the life that danced thereto? Didst thou say, in the dark of thy own unconscious self, ‘Let beauty be; let truth seem!’ and straightway beauty was, and truth but seemed?”
Man dreams and desires; God broods and wills and quickens.
When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfil it.
(George MacDonald, Lilith, [New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1895], Chapter XLVII: The “Endless Ending,” pp. 349-350.)
C. S. Lewis:
The Christian Way.—The Christian says, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.”
(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984], p. 120.)
C. S. Lewis:
You say the materialist universe is “ugly.” I wonder how you discovered that! If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (“How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married! I can hardly believe it!”) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.
(C. S. Lewis, Letter [To Sheldon Vanauken, 23 Dec. 1950, Magdalen College, Oxford]; In: Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, [New York: Bantam Books, 1979], p. 90.)
William Shakespeare: (Hamlet)
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
(William Shakespeare,“Hamlet,” Act III, Scene I; In: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, and As You Like It: A Specimen of a New Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Caldecott, [London: John Murray, 1820], pp. 67-68.)
G. K. Chesterton:
“…We have come to the wrong star. …That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.”
(G. K. Chesterton, “The Ballade of a Strange Town;” In: G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles, [New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910], p. 315.)
Philippians 3:20:
But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ…
(New International Version.)
G. K. Chesterton:
…my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship — even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.
(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, [New York: John Lane Company, 1908], p. 146.)
William Shakespeare: (Caliban)
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
(William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds. Louis B. Wright, Virginia A. LaMar, [New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1961], Act III, Scene II, p. 55.)
Cf. Frederick Buechner:
Caliban, the earthbound, the spawn of darkness, cries to dream again about joy beyond the walls of the world . . . and childish, escapist, impossible as it may be, we dream it, too.
(Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], p. 87.)
C. S. Lewis:
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. …Come further up, come further in!
(C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: Book Seven: The Last Battle, [New York: HarperCollins, 1994], p. 196.)
C. S. Lewis:
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from— . . . my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.
(C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, [Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1984], Ch. 7, pp. 75-76.)
Full. C. S. Lewis:
“This,” she said, “I have always—at least, ever since I can remember—had a kind of longing for death.”
“Ah, Psyche,” I said, “have I made you so little happy as that?”
“No, no, no,” she said. “You don’t understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine . . . where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”
“…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from— . . . my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover. Do you not see now—?”
(C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, [Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1984], Ch. 7, pp. 74, 75-76.)