Thursday 25 November 2010

Related thoughts on homesickness

- A little snippet of newspaper fell out of one of my books the other day - I'd clipped it out of an article I read in the summer. It's a quote from an Observer review of Sarah Silverman's memoir. I can't remember what I thought about the rest of the review, and I haven't read Silverman's book, but the quote rang true for me:
When her stepfather asked what it was like to be depressed, she replied: "I feel homesick." Now she adds: "That still feels like the most accurate description – I felt homesick, but I was home."

- I remember being really ill when I was little and having a high temperature and weird dreams, and waking up saying "I want to go home". I was in my parents' bed and they kept telling me that I was home.

- In my wallet I have a green card that says "Heaven is my home. Philippians 3: 20". That verse says:
"Our citizenship is in heaven" 
and the card reminds me that one day I will be home.


- An often-quoted portion of C.S. Lewis is where he writes about sehnsucht, a German noun translated as "longing", "yearning" and "craving", or in a wider sense a type of "intensely missing". He says it is the "inconsolable longing" in the human heart for "we know not what". The entry for it on Wikipedia is interesting.

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