Longing

I'm reading the book The Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller, who is also the author of the much-celebrated The Reason for God. He talks about beauty, and the concept of home and belonging. Here is a quote from his book, which is in fact a quote from C.S. Lewis' famous sermon The Weight of Glory. Yeah, thats right, nested quotes. And you thought Engineers couldn't write.

Keller quotes Lewis, writing about homesickness,

"Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Woodsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Woodsworth 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. 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 ting itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself... Now we wake to find...[w]e have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in..."