The dangerous duty of delight
The other day when I was at Koorong I also picked up a little book for $7 called The Dangerous Duty of Delight - The Glorified God and The Satisfied Soul by John Piper. I opened the preface and it quoted from CS Lewis, the passage that is also in the Wikipedia article on Sehnsucht:
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them ... For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Sometimes you feel like your life is taking on a theme.
Piper goes on to make the point that the beauty, however, has visited us, in the word becoming flesh (John 1:14). It turns out that this book is actually a shorter version of Desiring God and basically his argument for Christian Hedonism and the command to pursue joy in God (you can read some of it online here) - but that's OK because it's been years and years since I read that. I've enjoyed taking in a few bite sized chunks since - it's a nice small book with short chapters, which for some reason makes it easier to snatch little bits of it.