Others describe this longing as the answer to a cosmic mystery. “I feel that the secret of life, love, death, life’s paths taken or not taken—the Universe itself—is somehow embraced in its achingly beautiful promise,” writes the artist Peter Lucia of Sehnsucht. My favorite musician, Leonard Cohen, said that his favorite poet, García Lorca, taught him that he was “this aching creature in the midst of an aching cosmos, and the ache was okay. Not only was it okay, but it was the way that you embraced the sun and the moon.”
