Sehnsucht is a German word for an intense, often inconsolable longing or yearning for something beyond this world. C. S. Lewis identifies this feeling with what he calls Joy – “distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure,” and which “must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing”. Lewis traces this yearning in our hearts as a pointer to a “better country”, indeed a “heavenly one” for which we are made. In his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory” (1941), Lewis describes this “desire for our own far off country” with a kind of shy awe: it is a secret wound in our souls that we call Beauty or Nostalgia to cover up the ache. Nothing in our experience fully satisfies it; music, memories or art only trigger it like “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, [or] news from a country we have never visited”. In Lewis’s theology this longing – this Sehnsucht – is a signpost toward Heaven and God.
Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 rock anthem “Born to Run,” by contrast, never uses explicitly spiritual language, yet it erupts with the same aching hunger. The hero of the song feels entrapped and desperate, racing toward freedom in teenage dreams of escape. Both Lewis and Springsteen explore an ache of beauty, a pain of exile, and a desire for transcendence – but they frame them differently. For Lewis the longing ultimately points upward (to home), while Springsteen gives it a voice in the here-and-now: a gritty, urgent hunger for liberation, love, and belonging. In what follows we will unpack key lyrics from “Born to Run” alongside passages from “The Weight of Glory,” reading each closely for their emotional, spiritual and metaphysical resonances.
C.S. Lewis and the Far-Off Country
Lewis’s sermon The Weight of Glory centers on the “far-off country” that we all secretly long for. As he says, it is almost an “indecency” to speak of it, as if we are tearing open some sacred secret in ourselves. We mask this longing by naming it “Nostalgia” or “Romanticism,” but we feel “awkward” and laugh when it nearly emerges in conversation. Lewis’s point is that this longing has never been satisfied by anything we’ve actually experienced; instead, everything in our experience teases it. Worldly beauty – lovely sunsets, music, or memories – can stir the longing but cannot quiet it. He warns that calling these mere images “beauty” is a cheat: if we mistake them for the real thing, they become idols and break our hearts. In other words, every taste of beauty or joy hints at something more, something beyond.
For Lewis, that “something” is God. He suggests that our longing is good and God-given, meant to point us beyond mere earthliness. He even imagines it as a kind of enchantment: our whole modern education and philosophy tries to silence this shy, persistent inner voice by insisting “that the good of man is to be found on this earth”. We are taught to be content with worldly success or pleasures. But Lewis counters that we were created for more than mud pies in a slum – that is, more than petty pleasures – because God offers us “infinite joy” we can scarcely imagine. In Weight of Glory, he does not use the word “Sehnsucht,” but he makes the idea explicit: our desire is too strong to be for this world alone, and it is ultimately satisfied only in God’s promise. He calls it “glory” that God is calling us into His joy – a joy so weighty and “astonishing” that it surpasses all we can ask or think. In sum, Lewis sees Sehnsucht as a deep metaphysical hunger, rooted in our creation, that only Heaven and God can truly fulfill.
Springsteen’s Anthem of Escape
Bruce Springsteen (front) with the E Street Band – this iconic image from the 1970s captures the restless energy of Born to Run, a song about escaping and yearning. In “Born to Run,” Springsteen gives voice to a longing remarkably similar in feeling to Lewis’s: the narrator aches for something beyond his impoverished town. The song opens in gritty realism:
“In the day we sweat it out on the streets / Of a runaway American dream”.
The phrase “runaway American dream” is telling – the dream itself has run amok. By day the characters toil in a dead-end reality, and by night they “ride through mansions of glory / In suicide machines”. (Springsteen’s ironic “mansion of glory” alludes to something grand, even heavenly, but here it’s just a muscle car – a machine that carries them, dangerously, toward oblivion.) The town itself is portrayed as a predator: “Oh baby this town rips the bones from your back / It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap”. The young narrator feels ensnared by poverty and despair. His response is desperate: “We gotta get out while we’re young / ’Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run”. These lines become the song’s refrain – a mantra of escape.
To the Lewisian ear, “tramps like us…born to run” evokes the same restless longing Lewis describes. Springsteen’s heroes are, if not yearning for Heaven, then yearning for anything better: new horizons, love, excitement. In the second verse he sings of Wendy, the girl who stands with him in the darkness. “Wendy let me in, I wanna be your friend / I want to guard your dreams and visions” – here love becomes entwined with escape. By holding onto each other, they believe they can “break this trap” together: “Together we could break this trap / We’ll run till we drop, baby we’ll never go back”. The narrator is “a scared and lonely rider,” yet he must know if love is wild or real. In other words, love is the ultimate frontier he craves. It offers the hope of transcendence, albeit of an earthly kind.
Springsteen’s bridge adds more images of longing. They drive through “the boulevard,” past girls combing their hair and boys acting hard. He sees an “amusement park” rising “bold and stark” by the shore, and kids “huddled on the beach in a mist” – fleeting moments of escape from daily drudgery. Then he belts one of the song’s most striking lines: “I wanna die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight / In an everlasting kiss”. Here the longing becomes almost sacred – an “everlasting kiss” beyond time, something eternal in the midst of nocturnal ruin. Even though it’s not explicitly “heaven,” it hints at the same impulse: a desire for permanence and glory against the backdrop of a transient, cruel world.
The song’s final verse is both romantic and bleak. “The highways jammed with broken heroes / On a last chance power drive” – an image of people who’ve already been beaten down. “Everybody’s out on the run tonight / But there’s no place left to hide”. Even on the run, they feel exposed, exiled from safety. Yet the narrator refuses to give up: “Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness / I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul”. Love, again, is his beacon. He dreams: “Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place / Where we really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun”. A place “where we really want to go” suggests an almost utopian horizon – perhaps analogous to Lewis’s heavenly country. But crucially, Springsteen adds: “But till then… baby, we were born to run”. The destination is unknown and pushed into the future; all that matters now is movement. The longing is urgent but unresolved.
In summary, “Born to Run” paints a secular Sehnsucht: young hearts aching for freedom, for the next town, for the next new lover, anything that feels glorious or real. Springsteen’s beauty lies in capturing that ache in raw, kinetic images – mansions of glory, death traps, everlasting kisses – without invoking God. The song’s narrator doesn’t profess faith in a divine promise; instead, his “better country” is an America where dreams might come true. But because reality is harsh, their hope is postponed. As one commentator notes, Springsteen “had a much simpler core: getting out of Freehold” (his hometown). This eye toward escape – physical and emotional – is his answer to exile. It resonates with Lewis’s theme, but Lewis would say that such escape, if taken as final, is a betrayal of the true longing.
Ache of Beauty and Pain of Exile
Both Lewis and Springsteen speak to the ache of beauty – the bittersweet feeling when something wonderful reminds you of what you truly want. Lewis explicitly describes this: when “we call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter,” we are really lured by longing. He warns that music or art we think is beautiful will betray us if we trust it to satisfy our deepest desire. Beauty is only an echo of the real thing. Springsteen similarly pairs dazzling images with underlying pain. The night drives through “mansions of glory” and “suicide machines” are beautiful and thrilling, yet hollow. In his bridge, the glowing lights and girls combing hair hint at cinematic beauty, but they pass like flickers of a dream. Even love itself is a bittersweet beauty: the narrator’s vows to Wendy (“I’ll guard your dreams”) are beautiful, but grounded in the recognition of a suffocating hometown. The contrast between beauty and harsh reality is stark: at the song’s end he can imagine “walking in the sun,” but only “someday” – for now they “live with the sadness”. Beauty here intensifies, rather than eases, the ache.
The pain of exile is central to both works. Lewis often uses the image of exile (for example in Reflections on the Psalms, though not directly in Weight of Glory) to describe our spiritual state – strangers yearning for home. In Weight of Glory, he does not use the word “exile,” but the whole sermon implies that our experience of life on earth is like alienation from God’s world. In contrast, Springsteen’s exile is concrete: his characters are trapped in a dead-end town and in loveless routines. The lyric “this town rips the bones from your back” dramatizes their banishment. They sleep in trailers, ride around in fast cars, and dream of California – any place that seems far away. Springsteen’s people are figurative exiles, outsiders in their own culture.
Yet there is a key difference: Lewis would say our true home is beyond time and space (hence “heavenly”), whereas Springsteen’s protagonists can only imagine a better place in time (a future freedom). Lewis’s exile is cosmic and joyful (weeping now but rejoicing later), while Springsteen’s is urgent and unresolved. We might summarize: Lewis points north; Springsteen points west.
Heavenward Longing vs. Earthbound Escape
Lewis sees longing as pointer to the divine. In Weight of Glory he eventually quotes 2 Corinthians, suggesting that our “light affliction” is preparing “an eternal weight of glory” – not just personal satisfaction but being an “ingredient in the divine happiness” (as he famously phrases it elsewhere. Our desires are not too strong, he argues – they are weak by comparison to the infinite joy Christ offers. Every wish for romance, success, or delight hints at a fulfillment in God.
Springsteen’s worldview in “Born to Run,” by contrast, stops at the horizon of the finite. His heroes long for love, adrenaline, and escape – and while that longing feels boundless, the song never invokes eternity or God. The final lines “we’ll walk in the sun” offer a faint hope of a brighter day, but it is firmly of this world. The American dream, as Springsteen saw it, is a shimmer on the far side of the highway; we never see if they reach it. In interviews Springsteen has framed “Born to Run” as an ode to young love and the thrill of breaking free. It is an anthem for those who refuse to settle, even if what they run toward remains unknown. The hunger is unresolved – a temporary relief in each other’s arms, but no final resting place.
It’s interesting to note that Lewis and Springsteen both find danger in “settling.” Lewis warns us not to settle for the beauty-images themselves (“if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols”). Springsteen’s characters refuse to settle too, but in a pragmatic way: “We gotta get out while we’re young”. The difference is, Lewis forbids settling because only God can truly satisfy; Springsteen’s heroes forbid settling because Earthly life is too cruel to endure. One leads upward, the other outward.
Resonances and Divergences
Both “Born to Run” and The Weight of Glory resonate on several levels of Sehnsucht:
- Shared Longing: Both depict a hunger for something beyond the here-and-now. Lewis speaks of an innate longing for a “far off country” and springsteen’s narrator longs for “that place where we really want to go”.
- Beauty that Hurts: Both see beauty as bittersweet. Lewis calls beauty an “inconsolable secret”; Springsteen’s “mansion of glory” and “everlasting kiss” are beautiful but tainted with sadness.
- Exile and Escape: Both works feel the pain of exile. Lewis implies spiritual exile from home (the world seems alien without God’s presence), while Springsteen’s characters feel like exiles in their own town, wanting to flee.
- Love and Companionship: Both value love as a source of joy amid longing. Lewis, in Weight of Glory, actually speaks of the delight in serving and loving others as reflecting God’s love. Springsteen’s lyric “I want to guard your dreams” shows that he too sees salvation in connection with others.
The differences are equally striking:
- Orientation: Lewis situates longing within a Christian frame pointing to God and heaven. Springsteen’s frame is secular and earthly – the “place” he seeks is on some highway or somewhere in America, not necessarily a literal heaven.
- Hope vs. Resignation: Lewis exhorts hope in divine glory and warns against finding final satisfaction in this world. Springsteen’s hope is indefinite – he believes “we were born to run” but isn’t sure where or if they’ll stop. The song’s ending (“till then we’ll run”) embraces ongoing flight, not arrival.
- Tone: Lewis’s tone is earnest and theological – his language is abstract, mystical even (“ingredient in divine happiness”). Springsteen’s tone is urgent and gritty – streetwise and passionate. Both are intense, but in different registers.
- Resolution: In Lewis’s view, Sehnsucht will be resolved by union with God. He wants to “awake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness” and lead us home. In Springsteen’s song, the resolution is left open – the narrator only knows they have to keep moving. The transcendence is deferred.
Conclusion
Bruce Springsteen and C.S. Lewis meet in the same fundamental place: hearts that know they are longing for more than this life can give. Springsteen’s “Born to Run” channels that longing into youth culture and rock imagery – a fast car, a lover’s embrace, the wide-open road. Lewis, in “The Weight of Glory,” teaches that the same longing ultimately cries out for God’s kingdom. As Lewis might say, the call is “shy” but persistent. Springsteen’s version is not explicitly holy, but its passion confirms Lewis’s point: we are creatures of yearning. If Springsteen’s runaway teen stands on the threshold of possibility at sunset, Lewis reminds us that the day truly dawns beyond the horizon.
In the end, both works touch our souls because they recognize the ache of beauty and the ache of exile – the deep desire that will not be ignored. Lewis would urge us to listen, believing it is a divine clue: “We are always longing for more”. Springsteen would make us feel the edge of that longing in our bones, revving the engine until we cry out, “I want to know if love is real”. In that shout we hear the same timeless question – and perhaps the same hope.
Sources: Excerpts from C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”, as quoted in J.L. Neyhart and A Pilgrim in Narnia; lyrics from Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run,” lyrics cited from official sources. These were analyzed in light of the concept of Sehnsucht as described in Lewis’s writings.
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