![]() ![]() “I hate goodbyes,” Uhura says in the season’s penultimate episode, echoing the sentiments of most of the series’ audience. The series’ first season has been over for only a few hours-its 10th and final episode was released on Thursday-but I already miss my adopted, 23rd-century sci-fi family. As far as I’m concerned, the Enterprise could crawl along at the slowest warp factor, ferrying fuel to a distant base or mapping some new star system, if it meant more time to hang with my new Star Trek TV dad and his merry band of best friends/loyal lieutenants. ![]() The greatest strength of Strange New Worlds is that I wouldn’t mind if that summons from Starfleet never came. The vibe and decor in Pike’s quarters are retrofuturistic-sleekness and swank crossed with common-room hominess. (The man makes a mean waffle.) Then he does dishes, an apron protecting the uniform that he has to keep pristine in case a priority one message from Starfleet interrupts the bull session and beckons the captain to the bridge. Sometimes the captain cooks, eschewing the ease of the replicator in favor of the human, homemade touch. At Pike’s collegial Round Table, the dress code is casual, rank is irrelevant, and even ensigns speak freely. Often he has guests-crewmates and confidantes who’ve flocked to those flames, and to the warmth of their captain’s company. Then again, I felt that way about Japan and Japan turned out to be so much better than I’d imagined.Īnd of course, there will always be Narnia.There are always cheerful flames flickering on the hearth in Captain Pike’s cabin on the Enterprise of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. So much so, in fact, that I almost don’t want to go, lest the reality turn out to be less than what I see in my heart and mind. For they 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.Īnd for the record, Ireland and Scotland frequently fill me with fernweh (I mean, just look at that photo above). These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. Consider this beautiful quote from The Weight of Glory, which moves me every time I read it: In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. In my experience, no other writer has explored those concepts with quite as much poignancy. Lewis’ many writings concerning the topics of nostalgia and longing. Fernweh translates as “farsickness” and refers to “feeling homesick for a place you’ve never been or could never go.” (Sidenote: Germans really do have some of the best words for strange, random, and abstract concepts.)Ītlas Obscura asked their readers to submit places that make them experience fernweh, and the responses ranged from fictional worlds (Narnia and Middle-Earth) to earthly locations including Cape Cod, Ireland and Scotland (some of the most popular responses), and even Victorian England.Īll of this makes me think of C.S. While listening to NPR last night, I heard Ari Shapiro discuss this Atlas Obscura article about the German concept of fernweh. ![]()
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