Das ist die Sehnsucht

I love this wikipedia article (the link is to an old version of the page before something very uninteresting happened to it) on Sehnsucht. I want to be friends with the person who wrote it. I find the concept of Sehnsucht, or the inconsolable longing, a liberating one to grasp, in it's way. It is something other than contentment. It frees me from sitting at my desk bored out of my mind at work, before walking home past the concrete factory to eat dinner by myself in my flat, and struggling to tell myself, 'well I shouldn't desire anything outside of this'. Instead I can say, but ah yes I do, and I can't help that while-ever I am alive. But I can then go on to recognise that that longing will only ever be consoled with Christ in the new world, and then for eternity. And so I am freed from trying to actually find it here - all I go looking for, those things that stab for their very beauty, when I see the sunset over the water between the silos of the concrete factory or listen to Bach or remember childhood camps in the forest, "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" (Lewis in The Weight of Glory).

I am reading Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke at the moment. I have tried to find a translation of Rilke's poem, pictured here painted on the side of a house.

The best I have come up with is this, which doesn't quite work, taken from here:

That is longing: living in turmoil and having no home in time and those are wishes: gentle dialogs of day's hours with eternity

And that is life. Until out of a yesterday the most lonely hour rises which, smiling differently than the other sisters (hours) silently encounters eternity.