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Sehnsucht & Porn
If one word encapsulates the essence of German Romanticism, it is Sehnsucht. Langenscheidt's German-English Dictionary translates this as "longing, yearning, hankering, pining, languishing, nostalgia," but there is really no strict English equivalent. 'Unfulfillable' or 'inexpressible' longing perhaps come closest, but there is something in the original German that is distinctly lacking in any English translation. Sehnsucht conjures up horn calls far off in the dark forest, the poignant glow of the sunset, which we will never reach, no matter how quickly we race to the horizon, the snow-capped peaks of a distant mountain range. Beauty, distance, and the sense of something infinitely desirable just beyond our grasp: it is perhaps in music that we can feel its full effect, yet on a coarse and profane level we can see pornography as an everyday example of this poetic condition. These willing and available women stimulate an appetite they can never gratify. And like pornoaddicts, the Romantics who succumbed to Sehnsucht eventually discovered it was very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with an actual world of flesh and blood.
-- Gary Lachman, A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult |