Nick DeHoust: After Sehnsucht

In his chapter “Wilderness, Arcadia and Longing: Mythic Landscapes and the Experience of Reality,” Dr. Redick writes that “[l]onging, that experience Lewis called Sehnsucht, is mediated through participation, whether vicarious or directly, in particular kinds of landscape. Longing is a response to this participation in anticipation of communication that transcends mythopoeia” (1). What transcends mythopoeia? Reality. We spent a good deal of time at the beginning of the semester discussing phenomenology and its fundamental objective of coming into contact with the things-in-themselves — with pure, unadulterated reality. Thus, for Lewis, Sehnsucht seems to inspire a kind of organic phenomenological perspective, or at least a desire for one. Dr. Redick continues, “[s]ehnsucht, referred to by Carnell as the dialectic of desire, leads the participant to an experience of yearning, a longing to live in the world disclosed by the myth and imbued by the numinous” (3). This longing, then, longs for a reality that reflects the magnificence and numinousness of the myth. But where can such a thing be found? Edward Abbey, in his masterpiece Desert Solitaire (my all-time favorite book), offers a possible answer. It is worth noting that Abbey was a trained philosopher, and he embraced a learned (and rather radical) phenomenological perspective. 

“A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us — like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness — that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which sustains the little world of man as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures” (37).

I absolutely love this quote, and it seems to dovetail nicely with Lewis’s Sehnsucht. The “shock of the real” is that for which we long. Indeed, as Dr. Redick points out, “[w]ilderness and Arcadian landscapes will be shown to mediate longing as the approach to a transcendent experience of the real” (1). Long for the real, and then go allow its sublimity to shock you.