A feeling that accompanies us through life
Yearning knows no age
"What do you want?" We asked our friend Willi when he turned eighty. He thought for a long time, then moved on to the fact that it had long been his longing to see the Panama Canal. To swim once in a lifetime by ship on the Panama Canal, right and left jungle, and the parrots scream to hear. But that was nonsense, of course, that was too expensive. At first we were amazed, then we decided to fulfill his wish. If all the children, relatives and friends put together, waived a celebration in the restaurant and laboriously devised gifts, a voucher with flight, hotel and a small cruise would have to be in it. For two, of course, because his daughter Mitzi had to accompany him, because Willi was in a wheelchair. Ironically, the Panama Canal. He had once watched a TV movie and did not forget the pictures from there. Willi beamed on departure and on return. A happy man whose yearning had finally come true. He died fourteen weeks later.
Yearning must be directed at the unattainable, says my niece Caroline
What can be fulfilled does not count. A real longing is unreal, you are looking for something you can not get. That is why Sehn-Sucht is also called. You can be broken. Caroline, for example, longs for true safety and security, which is nowhere, for no one. Sometimes, she says, she wakes up at night and feels exposed in an unknown place where nothing but danger awaits her. And she is totally helpless. After such a nightmare, the next few days have run for her. "That's scary," I say. "No, longing," says Caroline. "The longing that I do not have to be afraid, you can call it yearning for salvation." She is so young. She has not had time to grow a rough skin to cope with the fear. Does this fear and longing belong to the young? Similar to the condition in which small turtles struggle desperately over the sand into the water, because the danger of being eaten is huge?
Fear of death and yearning, I have experienced both
When I was a young, almost still little girl, I sat in the bomb cellar, in our with ridiculous beams to the air raid shelter converted potato cellar, which shook with each impact. Around me the parents, my brother, the tiny sister who was still in the baby-basket? all that I loved. I remember well what I longed for these nights: to be alone in the world without fear of my family. Only me alone, I would have rather endured. I prayed: "Maria, put out her coat, make a protection and umbrella out of it ..." Again and again, again and again. The bombs did not catch us. But I still know the seizures of a wild longing to stand alone and without any responsibility in life. That terrible night, 1962, when Russian missile ships arrived in Cuba and American President Kennedy said it could mean a nuclear war "in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes on our lips." In the nursery my two little sons slept. At dawn the ships turned off.
Write something about desire
It must be easy to describe a feeling that everyone knows. Nostalgia ? what a nice word. A word that belongs to a whole epoch of sensitive poetry. To German romanticism. The nightingales were so longingly beaten, so silvery was the moon, so fragrant is the honeysuckle, in which the young lovers embrace each other and secretly exchange their kisses. Roses and forget-me-nots and soulful looks. Does she do you well, the yearning? Does she hurt you? She does everything. There are so many desires, big and small, that all spring from the desire to have something that you do not have, that is in your memory, or that is a future dream. One longs for the beloved girl, the other longs for the apple cake of his deceased mother, the patient longs to jump out of bed, the healthy for the adventure that carries him out of everyday life. One just wants to lie in the sun and listen to the sea, and an old man has the only longing to stand on a high mountain top he has conquered. And there is the yearning for death. I met her in a clinic in which depressed adolescents were treated. I should write an article about it. A nineteen-year-old sat across from me, a friendly boy who had tried to kill himself three times. A thoroughly "normal" guy, except for his strangely inward-looking look. He did not have much to say about his suicide attempts: "I was saved." Only at the end of our conversation did I dare to ask if he would do it again.He smiled, looked past me and said, "Maybe." I can not forget his eyes. These eyes, looking at another shore.
What are you longing for?
Not a bad question to talk to in an interview or at a blabla party. Most of the addressed must first think a bit. But almost everything comes to mind. In the Ruhr Valley a miner's wife told me that she would like to hear so much in the opera "Madame Butterfly". I got an unusual answer at a big party from a theatrical director in the mid fifties. He stood there with a champagne glass in his hand, gray-haired, in a tuxedo. He said, "After ice." There was just a Christmas premiere of the new production "Die Königskinder" by Humperdinck celebrated. "After ice cream," he repeated, "ice cream that I have to chop on a lake in the morning to get water." At the same time last year, he had been to the north of Lapland, in a small lonely hut by a small lake. No road, no electricity, no running water. A snowmobile had brought him here and gone again. In the spring, when the lake just started to melt, the sled picked it up again. After five months. The man was alone, he wanted it that way. His doctor had discouraged him: "What if you have a heart attack?" ? "Then that's how it is," he had said. Five months. That's not possible to describe. Cold, darkness, chopping wood, a fire hole in the oven, a kerosene lamp. Nobody there, no audience applauding. When the man spoke of it, it was hot in the room, loud and happy. He turned off his glass and said that he would know what it was to be there instead of here.
My desire is inconspicuous compared to others
I once picked it up, so to speak, in passing, that is, in passing. In an ICE Munich? Hamburg. On the route, a narrow field road accompanied the rails for a short time. It was lined with flowering chamomile and led up a sunny slope to a clearing. Hush, over. And suddenly it was there, that yearning feeling, that sad knowledge that I'll never go there, that everything is over so quickly and irretrievably? like so many moments in our lives that we just miss. We can not stop, we can not stop, we are in a hurry. Maybe we miss the best, because we are too restless, too fast for the smell of heather and chamomile. When I am in a melancholy mood today, this path appears, the sun, the grass in front of me. This silence.
Being in love again, that too is a longing
Nothing, I believe, resembles the heart racing at the beginning of a love, the first love above all. The longing for it may become less sweeping over the years, but it still tweaks. Going for a walk again for the first time, kissing in the cinema, falling in love with the big toe. It's a miracle that we graduated from high school at the same time, at the same time, but in separate boys 'and girls' schools. Actually, I could not think of anything but this boy with the dark hair and bony wrists of all young men. My father found him too pretty. Not me. He was babbling. I did not care. He said "Schätzle" to me. We could not breathe without each other. Then we went to different places of study, and our love somehow got lost. But the time we had together was beautiful. Because it was spring at the time, I feel a yearning for it every spring, when the air has a certain lightness. It is a heartwarming yearning, it does not plunge me into sadness. I have not missed anything. I had it. A very small pain is left over.
Yearning also has a dark side
A friend of mine, in her mid-sixties, remembered her childhood sweetheart after the death of her second husband. A Hungarian, Ferenc Esterházy. She did not know much more about him than his name. After the war, he was a refugee, Hungarian nobility, but without a job and money. She worked at the Patent Office and left him to marry her boss. The biggest mistake of her life, she says. She has been researching telephone directories, the Internet, local registration offices in Germany and Hungary for many years. Her yearning is sore. There are many Esterházy's, but no Ferenc, who worked in 1951 in Großhelferdorf near Munich on a stud farm. Her whole life has melted down to this one point: if I had married him, I would have been happy. Her name is Elisabeth, he called her Erzsébet. She will die as Erzsébet without him.
What does the desire make us?
It permeates our entire existence, including our everyday life. Sometimes she even waits for us in the kitchen. "Not hunger drives us to the stove, but the longing," I recently read in a newspaper report. Is that not true? Does not our heart go out when we see a long table under olive trees in a movie or a commercial, with the whole family around it, with red wine and cheese? There we want to be, in a community that enjoys each other and has it beautiful, sings and laughs. Not at a small kitchen table with a baked pizza.
