Existential Longings

Returning from a trip back home, C.S. Lewis on desire, and a picture of my dad.

“Cape Cod Morning” (1950) by Edward Hopper, on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life.

—Maria Popova, “The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What we Long For”

On Monday, I got back from a long weekend in New Jersey visiting my parents, brother, and grandparents with my 5- and 3-year-olds. Since arriving back home, I’ve been pelted by a mixture of migraines and not-quite nostalgia, both typical when I resettle after traveling backwards in time.

Right now, in my chest, I feel the buzzing of bass strings. It matches the pounding of the kick drum in my skull. And the key is melancholic, lots of minor chords—maybe something like an A minor to an E minor, then a D minor to an E.

I am thinking of the literal roads I walked this weekend with my children that I’d walked so many times before I was 22 and bade Bayonne adieu. And also the figurative roads I would’ve journeyed if I’d stayed or gone elsewhere.

I write about this often, both here and in my books. I tend toward literature, music, and art that makes me contemplate what I’ve done and haven’t. In the next weeks, I’ll finally write an essay I’ve been tinkering with for four years. It’s about The Motorcycle Diaries, the movie adaptation of Ernesto Guevara’s travel diaries from when he trekked through South America with his best friend the semester before finishing medical school in Argentina¹. While my life’s great adventure was objectively shorter and ostensibly less epic, as I rewatched the film three weeks ago at the Powell Library, I teared up thinking of my best friends and our time together in Scotland before our roads split forever².