Longing

Grattacieli a Manhattan

"It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine . . . Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. . . . It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when other birds of its kind are flying home. . . .
I am going, you see, to the Mountain. You remember how we used to look and long? And all the stories of my gold and amber house, up there against the sky, where we thought we should never really go? The greatest King of all was going to build it for me. . . .
And I am the one who has been made ready for it ever since I was a child in your arms, Maia. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from-- . . .
--my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Oh, look up at least once before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover. Do you not see now--?"

da Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis