White Whale is a little over the top in preaching its Greenpeace environmentalism, but it's a great adventure story. It's like Moby Dick from the whale's perspective, and yet somehow Seigel uses this story to show us what it means to be a human being.
I don't know what it is, but these books just absolutely connect with me. Seigel writes novels like a poet, and there is an undercurrent of the Hero's Journey that gives his novels a great depth. It's hard to describe, but it's amazing.
Last night I came across a wonderful passage which almost perfectly describes sehnsucht:
It was sweet, the sweetest music I had ever heard, and it pulled on the deepest strings of desire. The longing was for--I don't know what--and for the longing itself one would give up any number of things. The song seemed to fulfill desire, until a new depth of desire opened under that one, so that the desiring was the having, yet the having was the desiring.This passage reminded me of the writer who has described sehnsucht the best, C. S. Lewis. (In fact, I'm sure Seigel would have read Lewis, since he was a Wheaton graduate and a good friend of Dr. Clyde Kilby, author of several books on Lewis.) Sehnsucht is the topic of two of Lewis's books: Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim's Regress. In the Preface of the Regress, Lewis defines sehnsucht:
Though the sense of want is acute and even painful, ... the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognize the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated. This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it. 'Oh to feel as I did then!' we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness. For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having. To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.
