The Blue Flower

I was looking through my online pictures and came across this one which Chuck took in our backyard last Spring. It reminded me of a C.S. Lewis quote that I like from "Surprised by Joy":

"They taught me longing - Sensucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower."

I recently read Alan Jacob's biography of C.S. Lewis, The Narnian. He explains Lewis' quote as being a reference to a German romantic writer by the penname of Novalis. Here is the quote from pg. 40 of the Narnian:

In his first reference to it in his autobiography, he calls it by a more common name: remembering his youthful response to the sight of the Castlereagh Hills from his nursery window, he writes, "They taught me longing - Sensucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.

He is thinking of Novalis - the pen name of the German Romantic writer Friedrich von Hardenberg, who died in 1801 at the age of twenty-nine. The protagonist of Novalis's unfinished allegorical novel Heinrich Von Ofterdingen becomes obsessesed by a vision of a blue flower, which he first encounters in a stranger's tales and then in dreams:

There is no greed in my heart; but I yearn to get a glimpse of the blue flower [aber die blaue Blume sehn' ich mich zu erblicken]. It is perpetually in my mind, and I can write or think of nothing else . . .
Often I feel so rapturously happy; and only when I do not have the flower clearly before my mind's eye does a deep inner turmoil seize me. This cannot and will not be understood by anyone. I would think I were mad if I did not see and think so clearly. Indeed since then everything is much clearer to me.


He "yearns" or "longs" (sehn) for the flower - and yet nothing that he can grasp seems so desirable as that longing itself. This is the paradox of Sehnsucht: that though it could in one sense be described as a negative experience, in that it focuses on someting one cannot possess and cannot reach, it is nevertheless intensely seductive. One cannot say it is exactly pleasurable - there is a kind of ache in the sense of unattainability that always accompanies the longing - and yet, as Lewis puts it, the quality of the experience "is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction."