something so beautiful

Lately I’ve been reliving my adolescence, listening to music that I used to obsess over. The Cure was my favourite group as a teenager. In their songs I would glimpse something so beautiful that my heart would ache. I’d put the cd on high rotation imagining that if I listened to it enough I’d be able to grasp that ‘something’.

And listening again as a grown-up (whatever that might be) I can still glimpse it. The Cure can make magic with a few guitars and some nice words. But I know they are just middle aged men who have no more grasped the meaning of life than I have.

Ben Myers from Faith and Theology pointed out C.S.Lewis’ wisdom on this:

"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things ... are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of atune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

—C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory," in Transposition: And Other Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), p. 24. [The whole essay is gold. Let me know if you'd like to read it.]