David Thornton - Sehnsucht

“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.” (Lewis 30) In The Weight of Glory, Lewis brings up this idea of Sehnsucht or longing. But, in this situation, he is discussing how people experience beauty through certain things, but that does not mean that the longing is for those things. Pysche, in Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, longs for the Gray Mountain and that which is outside of the kingdom of Glome which she knows. But, she cannot describe what exactly she is longing for except for palaces and someone to be married to. This illustrates how ambiguous Sehnsucht can be in the sense of trying to describe it. The beautiful thing about Pysche’s longing was that her inability to explain it so that Orual could understand it did not take away from the longing itself. That’s because it is something deep inside of her that is very powerful, but usually longing after something that is not natural, which as Pysche found out, is quite hard to describe or talk about to others.