“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret
attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to
be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the
smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the
boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at
last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and
uncertain even in the best) of that
something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of
other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder
passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you
are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All
the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints
of it--tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes
that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really
become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but
swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility
of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We
cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each
soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired
before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which
we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows
wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose
all.” --CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain
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