Pining

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.

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When the time comes to you at which you will be forced to at last utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

-- C.S. Lewis, excerpts from Till We Have Faces