I came across this word, 'sehnsucht,' recently. It is a German word. There seems to be no good English equivalent. It denotes profound homesickness or longing or yearning, but with transcendent overtones. C. S. Lewis speaks of this spiritual homesickness in his famous essay, "The Weight of Glory." I thought you might like to explore this glorious bit of prose--it is careful thinking expressed by a precision that is scintillating.

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wadsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth 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 or our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself . . . Now we wake to find . . . we 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 . . .

Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.

Sehnsucht is never discovered easily or else everyone would find it--like a Starbucks on every corner.