It is impossible to take a bad picture at Edenton’s Waterfront Park, especially at sunset.
In a single flash of sunset last Thursday, the sun, before plunging into the southwestern horizon of the Albemarle Sound, flared in rhodium fire. Its rays spread vermilion blaze, beckoning the watcher’s gaze into its incandescent embrace.
Like strata, the gloaming spectrum passed upward by stages, into persimmon, then citrine and opal, and at the dome’s zenith, that ineffably Marian azure that ancient Christians recognized with familiar and poignant longing.
The eastern horizon was already wrapped in indigo veiling, the sable night acceding, Aquarius rising.
The color palette of our nightly splendor transcends language. Then again, all experience exceeds our words. You just have to be there. And remember. And desire.
Sunsets are always surprising, because after all, each one is new and unrepeatable. But most surprising is one certain feeling that they evoke: homesickness.
That is an unfortunate and misleading English word. When you’re homesick, you’re not physically ill at all. You’re not even experiencing something entirely unpleasant. Although it might be unsettling, like a distant echo of a heartbreak, an unplaceable pining away for a memory that cannot be recalled.
When we feel this sort of homesick at sunset, we flip through the photo album of memories, of homes long gone by. My album starts in Indiana, then hies off to Ohio, then Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, Maryland and Pittsburgh, finally to here on the dock in Edenton Bay. But none of these album leaves hold the answer.
There is an explanation for this hard truth that becomes more frequent as years of sunsets go by. What we are homesick for exceeds the past. What we long for rises above the setting sun.
Our sunsets evoke desire, not sentimental visits to the past.
There is a German word for this, better than the English term “homesickness”: Sehnsucht. It is hard to translate, but it is a deep longing or yearning. Susan Cain, in her eponymous book, calls it “the bittersweet.” I prefer C.S. Lewis’ rendering: “sweet desire.” The Portuguese coined a more mellifluous word for the same experience: “saudade.”
Better than anyone in modern times, as far as I know, Lewis described this feeling of sweet desire. In the midst of the darkest moments of World War II England, he delivered a sermon on June 8, 1941, at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, famously called “The Weight of Glory.”
And Sehnsucht was his theme: “This desire for our own far off country (is) the secret which … pierces with such sweetness …. 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 …. (William) 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.”
Wordsworth made the same attempt as I with my photo album, though far better sung in poems such as “Memory” and “Tintern Abbey.” But he, too, failed to “find the thing itself.”
Lewis goes on: “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.”
There it is. Eureka. What we yearn for, what we sweetly desire as an elusive homesickness, that Sehnsucht or saudade planted at the fundament of our human nature, is nothing less than what cannot be contained in the past or present, in language or thought or imagination.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 reminds us, “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set eternity in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” If God did not exist, suggested Saint Anselm of Canterbury, you could never have thought of Him, or eternity. You would never have desired it, or known beauty, had not God put it into your immortal soul.
In his “Symposium,” Plato said that beauty evokes desire, which is the real meaning of “eros.” This desire, in the old and better classical days, was thought to hold all the world together. All reality, matter and spirit, longed for unity and communion with eternity.
Beauty calls for this longing. In the tenth chapter of his “Confessions,” Saint Augustine confessed the awakening of this desire by beauty: “Too long did I take to fall in love with you, beauty so ancient and new … . You called and cried out and shattered my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you put my blindness to flight. You smelled sweet, and I drew breath, and now I gasp for you. I tasted you, and now I am starving and parched. You touched me, and I burst into flame with desire for your peace.”
Augustine (and Plato, and Lewis) must have seen the same sunset, or one very like it, that I saw last Thursday, that we all see shining from the horizon of our shared humanity. We long for the same sea-borne oriflamme in the West, awaking sweet desire, guiding, pointing toward the setting sun. L’amor che move ‘l sole e l’altre stelle — that is, “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”
Jonathan Tobias is a resident of edenton. he can be reached at janotec77@gmail. com, and his Substack address is https:// substack.com/@jonathantobias.
Most Popular
Comments / 0