The morning fog was settled so thickly the first day of October that approaching headlights appeared without warning. Best to take it slow as I found my way along the paved country road. Nine miles south of Madison I turned onto a gravel drive toward Dottie’s Ranch. Left and right, sepia-toned grasses leaned against the fence lines of a tired meadow dotted with spent coneflowers, black eyed Susans, and thistles. Over the crest of a small hill, a blaze of red sumac greeted me and further afield, gray silhouetted oaks held their ground. Soon the orange sun would burn off the morning mist and the spell of a gentle day would fall on the thousand-acre prairie. I had entered a nineteenth-century Jean-François Millet landscape painting.
Fifty yards before the gate, I witnessed something unexpected: a half-dozen long horned Highland cattle grazing on a dew-covered pasture. Compared to Wisconsin Holsteins, Scottish Highlanders are a stout breed, and that morning, absent any human presence, they roamed freely. Their ebonized forms anchored the middle ground between the road and the horizon and backlit by the golden morning light, the rustic cattle seemed magnificent to me.
Wanting a closer look, I eased my truck to the shoulder, stepped quietly from the cab, and headed toward the fence. As I drew near, one of the cattle, a bull, I think, lifted his impressively horned head and turned it toward me. I took several photos and slipped away but all the while I remained in his sightline. The observer, observed.
Moments later I entered the retreat house, helped myself to coffee, and joined the casual conversation until we settled into our meeting agenda. But throughout the day the image of grazing Highlanders lingered. Two years later it holds fast. The memory of the encounter evokes a deep melancholy in me.
In 1917, Sigmund Freud offered a clinical description of the condition he termed melancholia:
In melancholia, the occasions which give rise to the illness extend for the most part beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed, which can import opposed feelings of love and hate into the relationship or reinforce an already existing ambivalence.[1]
While Freud observed that bouts of melancholy could be episodic, he believed that the condition itself was generally triggered some great personal loss that, untreated, could manifest crippling sadness, even a wish for death. But Freud’s description of depression—a grave business—is ill-matched to the experience I described earlier. In her memoir Acedia & Me, poet Kathleen Norris presents another possibility: acedia, which she understands to be a kind of spiritual torpor. The third chapter of her book introduces readers to Evagrius Ponticus. In his writings, the fourth-century monk of the Eastern church, outlined “eight evil thoughts,” including sloth, that he believed posed a threat to healthy spiritual practices. Says Norris:
Evagrius marked acedia as one the spiritual afflictions, far more deadly than the more physical temptations such as gluttony or lust, or the melancholy arriving from deprivation or anger. Acedia, he insisted, is something more, a weariness of soul that “instills” in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, [and] a hatred for manual labor,” which in the early monastic world was always linked with prayer.[2]
There are more than a few ways to characterize melancholy. Neither clinical depression nor spiritual ennui describe the fog-shrouded encounter I had with the Highland cattle and yet all three share one critical emotion: a sense of loss. Let me explain. If the shaggy-haired beasts bathed in morning light were a joy to behold, that joy was evanescent. When I returned to my truck, that experience became a memory and that memory, fleeting. Hence the sadness, albeit a sweet sadness.
Sehnsucht (to behold, with compulsion) is the term C. S. Lewis employed to describe these kind of experiences. In the opening chapter of his memoir Surprised By Joy he offers this recollection:
Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. . . . As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.
Clive was five and Warren, his brother, eight. Lewis continues, “And every day there were what we called “the Green Hills;” that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery windows. They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing—Sehnsucht . . .”[3]
Lewis is describing the first sense he had of his romantic nature and he goes on to explain how neither his father or mother, nor his brother understood his manner of seeing and being. It seems notable that he published Surprised by Joy in 1955, near to the end of a six-year period during which he also penned The Chronicles of Narnia. In The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the first of those seven stories, four children, Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter, pass through a door located at the back of an old wardrobe in Professor Kirke’s manor house and enter the magical world of Narnia. Is this forest brother Warren’s “toy garden”? Perhaps.
Sehnsucht, Lewis’s early vision of Paradise and corresponding sense of longing, became the seed thought for so much that followed, not least his eventual conversion to Christianity. Lewis published Pilgrim’s Regress in 1945, but in 1963 he added a preface where he wondered if Sehnsucht might be likened to “that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves?”[4]
Lewis freely associates nostalgia with melancholia and it was surely important to Lewis. In a 1941 sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis offered:
Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is not mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.[5]
That “old ache” is a deeper sadness that Lewis often links to earlier joys. It is a beauty that he can witness or taste, but never possess, a far-off country he longs to visit. Whether Lewis was recalling the Castlereagh Hills of childhood, inventing Narnian tales, or revisiting Norse Legends over a pint with his good friend J. R. R. Tolkien, at least in part, these episodes of melancholy signaled the presence of meaning. Says Lewis:
Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and mythologies know all about it. We do not merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which we can hardly put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.[6]
My morning meeting with the Highlander herd triggered a boyhood memory. For the first ten years of my life our family lived on a farm in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A. H. Neece, my mother’s father, owned the place and kept a herd of 40 or 50 white faced Herefords. After first frost and as the north country settled in for winter, I recall the steamy exhale from the nostrils of those cattle as they pressed in tight around their feeding troughs.
If melancholic encounters are substantially sensate, they are also mysterious. For a moment we are exposed to a bit of real presence that draws us into a kind of time out of time. It may be a passing moment of ecstasy, fullness, or Spirit bearing witness to spirit but, living as we do beyond the Garden, it cannot last. “For now we see in a mirror dimly.” (1 Cor 13:12)
In closing, notice that these encounters—Lewis’s and my own—are something other than the kinds of spectacle that dominate our late modern world. Sehnsucht is not a staged performance, a crushing political victory, or a winning lottery ticket. Rather, it is an aesthetic encounter with the sublime, as our mind and spirit move in and out of rest, nurtured by a posture of attentiveness. It seems to me that one of art’s great labors is to sort out such things and string them together.
“Highlanders” is the first in a series of short essays on melancholy.
Notes:
[1] Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 588.
[2] Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 24-25.
[3] C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 7.
[4] Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, third edition(1933, London: William Collins, 2018), xiii.
[5] Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (1949, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 42. This sermon was first preached and transcribed in 1941.
[6] Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 42.
The digital image of Evagrius Pontus is provided courtesy of Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University.