Last night, Tim and I were talking about a short story we’d both read, and although it had a feature which the two of us usually find annoying, we forgave it. I know why I forgave it: because the story was well-written and provided that lovely feeling of possibility that a happy ending delivers. I like happy endings, even if they’re implausible.
Then today, thanks to a link from Josh and Josh, I saw some videos people had made to various songs using clips from (forgive me for once again referring to the most overused two words on the Internet) Brokeback Mountain. By now, no one in the world except maybe some political prisoners and children in potential venues for Survivor doesn’t know that this movie doesn’t give us a happy ending, so I’m not spoiling anything by saying so. But as I was watching the videos, I thought again of the bittersweet satisfaction that all of my favorite fiction and movies deliver summed up in one word: yearning.
We are born wanting. We want food and sleep and a clean diaper. Later, we want Bratz dolls and PlayStations. We want people to like us and be nice to us. We want to win at Candyland and go to Disneyworld and make the team and get our driver’s license and graduate and go to London. I think even Buddhist monks want something. Tibet. World peace. Harmony. Wanting just seems to be an innate feature of human existence.
But yearning… I think that we don’t understand or experience true yearning until we fall in love. I’ve never been one to dismiss young love, either, with a smug, Oh, you have no idea what love is yet. When we fall in love for the first time, even if we are fourteen, we are loving to the capacity that a fourteen-year-old can love, and it’s just as real as falling in love at forty. And if yearning is part of that love–the sense that it can never be, no matter how we long for it–we get to marvel at how something can be so wonderful and awful at once.
Happy endings make me–well, happy. But yearning makes me miserably happy. Crazy, isn’t it?
bravo and well put.
you oughta think about being a writer. 😉
wait!BrokeBack Mountain DOESN’T have a happy ending…OMG!!!!!!!!!
😉
The philosophy of “yearning” is in many many concepts. Buddhism has that as the ulitmate “give up”; it’s meant as desire. Even Jung said that we shadowed this perception of “yearning” for many things in other forms, simply because some things we just can not obtain, but yet we try to fulfill it with whatever else we can. And then to go on, Plato’s story of the cave, and watching the shadows on the wall were about yearning to know something other than the walls and shadows on the cave walls. Why not BE the shadow instead of just seeing it? The things is, yearning keeps us going. Without it, why bother breathing?
No. More like a powerful insight.