Sehnsucht

the homesickness of the soul

In college, I was required to sing an art song for my music department upper divisionals. I chose a song called “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt”. The song is based on a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. There are several musical settings, but the one by Franz Schubert is a beautiful mezzo soprano version, so I chose to sing it. I was also minoring in German so a “lied” felt appropriate to practice my diction. Goethe included the poem in his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, where it is sung by the character Mignon.

Mignon became a major archetype of sorts in German Romanticism, and represented a truly tragic figure that was not only spiritually lost, but separated even from herself.

The lyrics are as follows:

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Weiss, was ich leide!

Allein und abgetrennt
Von aller Freude,
Seh’ ich an’s Firmament
Nach jener Seite.
Ach! der mich liebt und kennt
Ist in der Weite.
Es schwindelt mir, es brennt
Mein Eingeweide.
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Weiss, was ich leide!

Only he who knows longing (’Mignon’s Song’)

Only he who knows longing
knows what I suffer.
Alone, cut off
from all joy,
I gaze at the firmament
in that direction.
Ah, he who loves and knows me
is far away.
I feel giddy,
my vitals are aflame.
Only he who knows longing
knows what I suffer.

The word “sehnsucht” in German is almost untranslatable. It means many things to the reader, but most of all a deep yearning, a spiritual homesickness, an ache for something distant. A sense of nostalgia for a physical, temporal, or geographical place that you can no longer return to.

Now that I am 45, I have been thinking more and more about this. This yearning. This Sehnsucht.

Three weeks ago, our family went to see the Michael Jackson movie. For full disclosure, I was and have always been a dedicated MJ fan. Being born in the 1980s, it just made sense. He was everywhere. He permeated the culture, the airwaves, the conversations. The air itself seemed to pulse with the bass line from “Billie Jean.”

My cousins had the iconic Beat It jacket, and we would practice the dance in their living room for hours on end. In the early 90’s, the obsession was so intense that I would have several friends over after school, and inevitably when he was featured on Entertainment Tonight, or another evening news show, we would set up VHS tapes on different floors of the house so we could record all of them and not miss a single feature.

In 2009, when he passed away, I had to pull over while driving because I was crying so hard. It felt like I had lost a friend. And I know I’m not alone in that sentiment.

I had introduced the girls to his music throughout their lives, but as we walked into the theater, I kept my expectations low. With a teen and a tween, you never know how things will go. I expected them to sit through it, enjoy the music, and leave happy, but that was all.

During the beginning of the film, I decided to move down to the front, and my older daughter came with me. I kept annoyingly giving her little bits of commentary:

“That’s Berry Gordy. He signed them to Motown.”

“That’s Quincy Jones. Famous producer.”

Finally, through gritted teeth, she whispered:

“Mom. Stop.”

So I did.

But nothing could have prepared me for what happened at the end.

During the final song, I looked over, and Evie was staring in rapt attention, jaw agape. I knew she had finally gotten it. She understood.

Ever since that day it’s been nonstop MJ. We’ve been trading reels on Instagram, she bought Thriller on vinyl and we’ve been jamming in the car on the way to school. I dug out all of my MJ paraphernalia; his autobiography, my old records, fan scrapbooks, even my old VHS tape of Motown 25.

At one point, during a two-hour marathon viewing of his Wembley Stadium concert in 1988, she looked over at me, eyes filled with tears. She said “mom, why couldn’t I have been alive for this?”

Sehnsucht.

Before the Michael movie reawakened all of this in me, I talked to them all the time about what it was like growing up in the 80’s and 90’s.

I constantly tell my girls stories. I feel like the old woman on the stoop: “That reminds me of a time…” I say, and I can see them trying not to roll their eyes, even though they genuinely want to hear it.

But no matter how much I describe what it felt like growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they can never fully know it for themselves. They can understand it secondhand, but that isn’t the same thing. No matter how many videos they watch or how carefully they reconstruct those years in their minds, it will still only be a shadow of what it actually felt like to live through them. It would be like me trying to imagine Woodstock.

You can’t capture a zeitgeist in a sentence. You can’t explain how your existence collided with a particular moment in history and became tangled up with songs, smells, clothes, summers, heartbreaks, and ordinary moments that later turned mythic in memory. I can hand them a fact, but I can’t hand them a feeling.

Maybe that is part of growing older: realizing how much of life eventually becomes unrecoverable, except in fragments. A VHS tape. A record sleeve. A melody.

I think that is why Mignon has stayed with me for so many years. Goethe understood that certain forms of longing never fully resolve themselves; they simply become part of us.

And perhaps that is why Michael Jackson still feels strangely painful for me to remember. He did not merely belong to an era; in many ways he became part of the emotional atmosphere of it. And by that, the emotional atmosphere of the many people his music affected. Looking back now, despite his massive fame and influence, he seems almost too spiritually fragile for this world.

Maybe Sehnsucht is ultimately the realization that beauty and grief are often inseparable. That the moments which shape us most deeply are usually the very ones we can never fully return to again. The ache is where the love is.

And it brings me joy to know my girls will have their own stories to tell, one day.