Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Complete index of Jon Kennedy's Jonal articles

Jon Kennedy's latest book is The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, now in stores, from Adams Media, F&W Publications. From May 9, 2007 through July 2, 2008 his blog entries or "Jonals" were articles inspired by readings in Lewis's work that didn't fit into the book. Click here for a list of all articles in the C.S. Lewis Overflow series. The book is available for purchase in support of the Liberty Museum in Nanty Glo and is also available on Amazon.

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Sehnsucht and the sad songs

Jonal entry 1096 | April 1 2009

A while back I said I would try to think through what it is about the pop music golden oldies of the late 1950's and early '60s, especially (though I have lots of favorite songs from the '70s and '80s, too), that strikes such a chord in many of my generation. What kind of music we liked and why we liked it was one of the very earliest topics in these Jonals, beginning with Jonal 21, and continuing through no. 32. (Click the link if you'd like to browse through them.) In that early foray into this topic I came to the conclusion that the quality in music that most endears itself to my taste is a combination of "joyful sadness." But, though I think that was a true finding about such songs, after my immersion in the thinking and insights of C.S. Lewis since 2007, I think I can embellish that theory a bit.

In 2006, before I had any idea I would ever be writing a book about C.S. Lewis, I did three articles around the general topic "sehnsucht," and homesickness. (The series began here, continued here, and concluded here.) In those articles I referred to Lewis's feelings of "sweet longing" which he called "joy" and also gave the technical term from German philosophy, "sehnsucht." Before his conversion, throughout his boyhood and early manhood, Lewis's greatest pleasure in life came from the moments of this "joy" that might strike him while he was taking a hike through the woods, or even observing wildlife, or seeing a certain kind of picture. He used those feelings as the hook on which he hung his autobiography of his early years, Surprised by Joy. But the point of that book is that once he found Christ, his joy was fulfilled in something quite different than the triggers of his earlier joy suggested. The real joy was the experience of Truth as a person through the renewing of his mind.

Lewis, though not ever very lonely because he was always close with his brother and in his university days made friends quickly and felt closer to them than most people probably feel about "friends," had a philosophical nature and studied that area of the humanities as his first major (or as it might have been called in those days, his first "concentration") getting his first degree in the study of classical philosophers. So his glimpses of "joy" were a major fascination to him. But I think that in my own life, the closest thing I've ever come to such glimpses is the thrill and the "transport" I have often received by hearing what rock and roll radio used to call a "golden oldie," especially one of the songs that meant a great deal to me in earlier years. Such songs would put me into a "mood" that seemed very sweet but also unattainable, and hearing one of them, even years later, might transport me "back there" and for a minute or two I would be "young again" for the length of the song.

Almost all of the songs that had that effect on me were what another top-40 hit once immortalized as "sad songs." They were often about lost love...or the death of someone loved, or even the loss of innocence or naivete. I could never quite put my finger on why they had such an effect and why I liked them (one of my sons once disgustedly asked me how I could like such morbid songs so much, to which I could only gape in unbelief...how could he not love such songs! Is he really my son?)

Now I think C.S. Lewis has given me an insight into why this was the case and to some extent, it always will be the case as long as I have these wits about me. In a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves in 1930 he wrote, referring to one of his favorite writers, William Morris, and of the sense of “longing” he had always found in Morris's work:

over all the haunting sense of time and change making the world heart breakingly beautiful just because it slips away ('Oh death that makes life so sweet' as he says) all this, I thought, he gave to perfection:

It is heartbreakingly beautiful just because it slips away. And for me, I think the sad songs that meant the most to me were songs about an ideal that could never be reached. Love songs that say "we'll never forget," or "I'll never stop loving you" are so false that we know in our bones the first time we hear them they're a crock. But we so much wish it could be true that they make us sad and even joyful because, well, hope springs eternal, and hope is one of the things that keeps young people young and forward-looking.

Lewis told Arthur that he had come, as a Christian, to realize that Morris's writing was full of it, too.

but of what this longing really pointed to, of the reason why beauty made us homesick, of the reality behind, I thought he had no inkling. And for that reason his poetry always seemed to me dangerous and apt to lead to sensuality....

Morris missed, Lewis is saying, from the persepctive now of a reborn disciple, the God who is the true object of the longing and the return to God that was life's point. A year and a half later, he seems still to be learning more about this, by adding in another letter to Arthur: “for perfect beauty you need to include things which will at once show that mere beauty is not the sole end of life.”

Ironically, I don't suppose that Lewis could even relate to my love for popular music. He would consider it all banal and not worth listening to, it would probably have sounded to him like nothing but noise, the way most latter day popular music strikes me (hip hop and its derivations). For years, one of the things that alienated him from the church, even, was that the music was so "low brow"; the Protestant hymns all struck him as gratingly sentimental, whereas it was such hymns that were among my first motivators to be a Christian and they still express much of my own sense of joy in believing, even though the music in the Orthodox Church I've been in now for nearly 15 years is nothing like the old Methodist hymnal songs. But I think I've found the answer. We know it—the mythical love of the sad love songs—can't be true...it's too good to be true, and yet there is a land beyong this world where all forever hopes and dreams will be fulfilled and as Lewis expresses better than anyone else, surpassed. This applies both, each in its own way, to "Amazing Grace" and "True Love Ways."

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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