Sehnsucht and “Pure Northernness”

Last updated on: July 11, 2026 at 6:59 pm by Dan Peterson

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Sehnsucht and “Pure Northernness” 2026-07-11T18:59:23-06:00 Dan Peterson

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In my former missionary tracting area, Lauterbrunnen in the Berner Oberland of Switzerland — perhaps, in my judgment, the most beautiful landscape on Planet Earth. I post it here not merely for its (slight) relevance to this blog entry, but for the soothing power of splendid natural beauty.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I don’t know whether I’m unique (weird?) in this regard or not but, when I hear an excruciatingly beautiful piece of music or see an achingly beautiful landscape — please note those two adjectives expressive of pain; they were deliberately chosen — I want to possess it in some way more than I actually can possess it. I’m not sure precisely how to express what I mean. I definitely don’t mean that I want to possess it in some exclusive way — I have no problem with others enjoying it as well — but, rather, that I want it to be somehow permanent. I always think of the line that Goethe places in the mouth of Faust (though not exactly, I know, in the way that either Faust or Goethe intended it): Addressing a moment of particular joy and/or beauty, Faust says to it, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (“Linger a while. Thou art so beautiful,” or something to that effect.) I’ve felt that way many times on this trip, as I have before and elsewhere.

Many people love beaches and tropical islands. I love them, too. I grew up, after all, in southern California, and I made my first visit to Hawaii at the age of five. (I have no idea how many times I’ve been back since.)

But, if pressed — and even if not pressed — I must admit that the terrestrial landscapes that most powerfully resonate with me, that stir me most deeply, are alpine. For slightly more than two weeks, when I was eleven, I hiked the John Muir Trail through California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. I fell in love with Switzerland and the Alps on my first visit to Europe just out of high school, and I was absolutely ecstatic to be called to serve in Switzerland thereafter as a missionary. Similarly, I love the fjords and the lakes and the mountainous valleys of my grandmother’s Norway. And I love the Canadian Rockies. I can’t get enough of them.

Valley of the Ten Peaks and Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

In this context, I inevitably think of C. S. Lewis’s notion of Sehnsucht, and of what he called “pure northernness.” Back in early February 2o12, I wrote about it in a column for the Deseret News:

A central theme in C.S. Lewis’ autobiographical book “Surprised by Joy” — and the obvious source of its title — is what he terms “Joy.”

Yet Lewis struggles to convey what he means. “Longing,” he calls it, sometimes using the evocative German synonym “Sehnsucht.” He describes fleeting instants when, encountering a landscape or phrase or musical passage, he suddenly and unexpectedly “desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described.” “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.” Of his earliest such experience, he writes, “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.”

Lewis’ first encounters with “Joy” often involved Norse mythology and, eventually, the music of Wagner: “Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of northern summer, remoteness, severity.” Yet he eventually realized that his yearning wasn’t really for things Norse and Northern, but for something beyond them.

Joy, in Lewis’ sense, is “an unsatisfied desire, which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Though it resembles them in the sense that “anyone who has experienced it will want it again,” it’s distinct from happiness and pleasure. Indeed, he describes it as “inconsolable,” a “stabbing,” a “pang” and a sense of “loss,” observing that “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.” “All Joy reminds,” he says. “It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.'” It always “implies the absence of its object.”

When I first read Lewis on “Joy,” I knew immediately what he meant.

He wondered whether others shared his experience. I have.

The eminent Austrian-American sociologist Peter Berger regards northern Italy’s extraordinarily beautiful Lake Como as the most powerful argument for the existence of God. I would quibble about the specific location, but I understand.

Certain alpine landscapes — in the Canadian Rockies, in Italy around Cortina d’Ampezzo and the Dolomites, and, pre-eminently, in Switzerland’s Berner Oberland (where I served as a missionary) — have often awakened in me an aching and almost overwhelming sense of transcendence.

I know how it feels to want to possess them in a way that they simply cannot be possessed — though what I’ve just written doesn’t really capture the feeling. What would it mean to “possess” the Bernese Alps? How, Lewis asks, can anybody “possess” the “Idea of Autumn” (as, in one such transient moment, he deeply desired to do)?

I can no more define the experience than Lewis could. I’m confident, though, that some readers will recognize it.

The desire is, in a sense, entirely vain. “Stay a while!” Goethe’s Faust implores one rapturous but passing moment. “You are so beautiful!” But the moment doesn’t stay. Everything is transient.

Still, I believe that such experiences offer powerful religious meaning to those who’ve had them. They are, I think, “stabs” of “divine homesickness,” a yearning for something unspeakably and unchangingly beautiful, good, and holy. Eliza Snow reminisced that, even before Mormonism, “ofttimes a secret something whispered, ‘You’re a stranger here,’ and I felt that I had wandered from a more exalted sphere.” William Wordsworth perceived “intimations of immortality” (and of a premortal existence) in nature. The Persian poet Rumi compared the human soul to a reed; the plaintive sound of reed pipes expresses the reed’s longing for its lost home in the reed bed just as we yearn for the divine home from which we’ve been severed.

Reasoning that, since ordinary desires (e.g., for food, water, air, sex or companionship) can always be fulfilled (at least potentially), Lewis argued that the yearning he called “Joy” also promises the possibility of satisfaction — if only in another world.

“You have made us for Yourself, Oh Lord,” wrote St. Augustine in the first chapter of his “Confessions,” “and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Spending fifteen days on the John Muir Trail in California’s High Sierras when I was eleven was a pivotal experience of my youth. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

My own experience with Sehnsucht, which has been recurrent throughout my life, goes back at least to a very specific moment when I was an eleven- or twelve-year-old Boy Scout hiking a mountain trail in California. I can’t even really describe it, though I can still somehow see it in my mind. (I don’t even remember exactly where it was, which is probably okay because, if I tried to return to it, I almost certainly wouldn’t have the same experience. As the saying has it, “You can’t go home again.”) Anyway, a friend and I came over a high ridge and looked down into a wooded valley at evening time. In the distance, the smoke of a cabin or a campfire curled up. And the feeling hit me. Powerfully. Unforgettably. Since then, a famous little poem by J. W. von Goethe has unfailingly evoked that memory in me, being mysteriously but inseparably connected with it — though I don’t need Goethe’s famous lyric to experience the feeling:

Wandrers Nachtlied II

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Wanderer’s Nightsong II (my rough translation, wholly unworthy of Goethe’s perfect little gem)

Over all the summits
Is repose,
In all the treetops
You hear
Scarcely a breath;
The birds are silent in the forest:
Wait. Soon
You too will rest.

A bridge across part of Thousand Island Lake on the John Muir Trail in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.
When I was eleven years old, I backpacked half of the Trail with my Scout troop. It took fifteen days, and was one of the greatest formative experiences of my life.

I haven’t availed myself of even a fraction of the entertainment and activities that are available onboard the Coral Princess. I have reading and other things that I want to do, and some urgent writing tasks that I need to address. And, on these very long northern summer days, I really like to read and write out on our balcony, watching the ocean and the mountains go by. Last night, though, we attended an enjoyable concert of singing and dancing that centered on operas and musicals. The night before, we stayed in our cabin and watched the 1993 film version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing that stars Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson and a number of other fine (and prominent) actors. I have one major interpretive quarrel with the production — I think that, in a single specific scene, it badly misreads and misrepresents what Shakespeare wrote — but, otherwise, I like it and I had a good time seeing it yet again.

Today, we spent at least twelve hours docked in Skagway, Alaska. (The name is an Anglicized corruption of the Tlingit Shg̱agwei.) Our major activity here was taking a narrow-gauge railroad train along the White Pass and Yukon Route that ultimately links the port of Skagway with Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon. (It was built to serve the needs generated by the gold rush that occurred in the Klondike region over in Yukon from 1896 until 1899.) We didn’t go that far, but we climbed up through forests and fog, over large gorges, and past waterfalls before we returned to Skagway below.

Posted from Skagway, Alaska

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