The suffering and joyous company

I started to read another Elizabeth Goudge novel, and didn’t make it through the first chapter before there was a paragraph I wanted to write out. Clearly I am one of these folks as it stabs me with longing and hurts me a little just to read this. 'Fugitive beauty' is another facet of our friend die Sehnsucht … 

The three men paused to smile at him, their teeth flashing in their dark faces, their gesticulating hands expressing the amiability of their feelings towards him, then with a final grin and flicker of the fingers they dismissed him into the sunset and became garrulously absorbed in fish. Their talk, rapid, dramatic, rising and falling with a soft musical inflection, drifted after Colin as he skipped and hopped along the Harbour wall with Maximilian at his heels. It would drift through his dreams all night like a purling stream, and the memory of it, when in after years he became a wanderer on the face of the earth, would catch at his heart and make him sick with longing for the sound of the sea lapping against the Harbour Wall, for the smell of the boats and the seaweed, and the sight of St. Pierre in the summer dusk. But Colin the boy, running along the wall, knew nothing of the memories of fugitive beauty that would haunt Colin the man; he only knew, as he paused suddenly on one leg and looked at the loveliness around him, that the Harbour looked jolly and that though he felt happy he had a curious pain in his stomach. He had so recently joined the suffering and joyous company of those who comprehend beauty that he did not connect these three facts. This initiatory pang confused him; gazing round him at the familiar scene he wondered why it hurt.

~ Island Magic, Elizabeth Goudge