C. S. Lewis famously saw in our deepest longings the signature of another world. In his letters and essays he often used the German term Sehnsucht to describe a profound, inconsolable yearning for something beyond anything we have known – a longing that earthly pleasures can only hint at. In Surprised by Joy Lewis calls this feeling Joy (not the ordinary happiness) and says it “must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing”. Likewise, in The Weight of Glory he speaks of a “desire for our own far-off country” that makes us call it names like nostalgia or romanticism, “the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell” because it is “a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience”. Put simply, Lewis viewed Sehnsucht as a bittersweet, homesick ache for the transcendent – an unsatisfied desire for an ultimate Good that no on‑earth experience fully fulfills. This analysis will explore Lewis’s conception of Sehnsucht as he develops it in works like Surprised by Joy and The Weight of Glory, and then show how Billy Joel’s song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” embodies a similar mix of nostalgia, hope and irretrievable loss. Reading Joel’s lyrics alongside Lewis’s thought, we see how the song’s narrative – with its affectionate remembrances and poignant farewell – resonates deeply with Lewisian longing.

Sehnsucht in Lewis’s Thought

Lewis never uses the word Sehnsucht extensively in his published writings, but the concept permeates them. In Surprised by Joy (1955), his spiritual autobiography, Lewis reflects on how even the most intense pleasures are tinged with a strange pang of desire. “Joy must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing… All Joy reminds [us]… that it is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be’”. In other words, every experience of pure delight is at once a reminder of something beyond: it awakens a yearning for a reality that we cannot quite grasp or keep. This Joy (Lewis’s translation of Sehnsucht) is not contentment but a beautiful ache. To Lewis it is “more desirable than any other satisfaction,” in that the longing itself becomes the chief object of desire.

Lewis goes further, arguing that such unquenchable desires point to our destiny. In a famous passage (often cited from Mere Christianity, but originally in Surprised by Joy), he observes: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy… then the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” He reasons that unlike hunger or thirst (whose satisfactions exist in the world), this peculiar longing (Sehnsucht) suggests the existence of something “other” – a “true country” of which our joys on earth are but shadows or signposts. This is Lewis’s Argument from Desire: our aching for the eternal is evidence that God has put eternity in our hearts. Thus he counsels Christians not to despise earthly blessings, but never to mistake them for the final thing; rather, we should “keep alive in ourselves the desire for our true country, which we shall not find till after death”.

Lewis echoes St. Augustine when he says this far‑off country is “not in this world,” even as all our experiences – beauty in nature, music, friendship, literature – seem to whisper of it. For example, in The Weight of Glory he paints a vivid picture of how this longing plays out. He admits that speaking of our “own far-off country” is almost indecent – “I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you”. This secret is the ache we often cavalierly call “homesickness” or “nostalgia,” but which is really a divine longing. He explains that familiar comforts (the “beauty” we find in past memories or beloved books) are only pointers to something greater. Such images are indeed “good images of what we really desire,” yet if we mistake them for the real thing they become “dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers”. In one of his most quoted lines, Lewis writes that these consolations 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”. The longing they arouse is real, but it pulls us toward the unseen reality itself.

Behind all these passages is Lewis’s conviction that human longing is ultimately a longing for God and for glory – a truth he again espouses in The Weight of Glory. That book is suffused with the idea that our desires are not too strong but too weak; they have been satisfied with earthly substitutes. In Heaven, Lewis believes, those desires will be fulfilled completely. But on earth they are only kindled, not quenched. Hence the descriptor Sehnsucht: it is a deep, bittersweet homesickness for a perfect happiness that our souls vaguely remember. Its bittersweetness means we can never get fully comfortable with the world as it is. In Lewis’s view, then, Sehnsucht is not pathological but part of the human condition – an imprint of the eternal stamped on the heart, calling us higher even as it makes mere transitory joys feel incomplete.

Joel’s Nostalgic Narrative

Billy Joel’s 1977 song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” is a multi-part saga of memory, played out in the happy-but-melancholy tone of a late-night reunion. It opens in the present: two old friends sit down over wine (“A bottle of white, a bottle of red”) at “our old familiar place” – presumably the titular Italian restaurant. The familiarity of this scene immediately evokes nostalgia and comfort. The narrator notes that “things are okay with me these days”: he has a job, a family, and is pleased to reconnect (“You lost weight… I did not know you could ever look so good after so much time”). Yet even as they share an ordinary dinner, their conversation drifts into reminiscence. Joel carefully crafts lyrics that ring with youthful detail: “I remember those days hanging out / at the village green… engineer boots, leather jackets, and tight blue jeans”. These are concrete images of their teenage years – settings and attire that paint the carefree vibe of the early 1960s (Joel was born 1949). The song’s narrator is swept back into that era with his friend, recalling “those sweet romantic teenage nights”.

Central to this retrospective is the story of two high-school sweethearts, Brenda and Eddie. Joel sings that Brenda and Eddie were “the popular steadies and the king and the queen of the prom”. In those memories the pair “nobody looked any finer / Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner”. For the young narrator and his friend, Brenda and Eddie seemed to embody the perfect life: they were admired, carefree, and deeply in love. The lyric “We never knew we could want more than that out of life” suggests just how idealized those days were. In their youthful innocence, it never occurred to anyone that life could hold anything beyond those simple joys. Indeed, the friends assumed “Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive” – that the strength of their love would carry them forever.

But as the song unfolds in its narrative section, the dream cracks. Joel tells us that in summer 1975, Brenda and Eddie decide to marry, despite protest that “Eddie could never afford to live that kind of life”. For a while they are happy – an apartment with “deep pile carpet” and quirky furnishings from Sears. Yet soon “they started to fight when the money got tight, and they just didn’t count on the tears”. The story speeds through their marital breakdown: “They lived for a while in a very nice style, but it’s always the same in the end”. Consistent with the narrator’s earlier confidence, Brenda and Eddie “got a divorce as a matter of course, and they parted the closest of friends”. Even as friends, however, they apparently drift apart: “then the king and the queen went back to the green / But you can never go back there again”. In the song’s final verse these lines ring with melancholy: the golden days at the village green – the site of their high-school innocence and romance – have become irretrievably lost.

Throughout this narrative, Joel’s tone remains sympathetic rather than bitter. The lyrics note with wry acceptance that despite setbacks “we always knew they would both find a way to get by”. He coyly confesses “That’s all I heard about Brenda and Eddie / Can’t tell you more than I told you already”, as if even the narrator himself can’t fully explain the inexplicable ache that remains. The words “wavin’ Brenda and Eddie goodbye” are repeated at the end of the second and final verses. This farewell is not a triumphal goodbye but a bittersweet acknowledgement that those people – and the promise they once represented – are gone from the characters’ lives. Brenda and Eddie’s “show” has ended, and the narrator and his friend wave at its close, understanding that life has moved on.

After the break-up story, the song returns to the Italian restaurant theme. The music softens and Joel reprises the opening chorus: “A bottle of red, and bottle of white… I’ll meet you anytime you want in our Italian restaurant.” The repetition of this refrain suggests a comforting ritual. Despite all that has changed, the restaurant remains a stable refuge – a place where old friends can gather “face to face”, drink, and remember. The final words “I’ll meet you anytime you want / In our Italian Restaurant” have a quiet resolve. There is no grand resolution to the Brenda and Eddie story; instead, the narrator asserts that he and his friend will preserve their connection wherever and whenever, whether the mood is “red or white”. In this way the song’s frame reminds us that amid shifting lives, some comfort lies in shared memories and rituals.

The Longing Between the Lines

Joel’s narrative and Lewis’s ideas come together in the song’s emotional subtext. The nostalgia in “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” echoes Lewis’s notion that worldly experiences can only ever remind us of something greater. The friends’ cheerful reminiscence of teenage times is full of vivid detail, yet it is tinged with an implied awareness that those moments were only glimpses of a larger, more elusive joy. For example, the line “We never knew we could want more than that out of life” conjures precisely the Wordsworthian “cheat” Lewis warns of: the illusion that full contentment lies in a past moment. It is as if the young narrator is taking his ease on memory’s shores, believing that boat is finally docked – but as Lewis would note, one cannot truly return to that harbor. Indeed, the song repeatedly reminds us “you can never go back there again”, echoing Lewis’s claim that even if we retrace our steps, we would “not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it”.

Joel’s characters experience this firsthand. Brenda and Eddie’s romance in 1962 feels like all they ever wanted, but when they try to make it last in real life, the intangible “something” is missing. The couple’s apartment and possessions – “deep pile carpet”, Waterbed, Sears paintings – are concrete, but they fail to capture the original longing. By the end, even though they remain “the closest of friends”, the lyric “you can never go back there again” acknowledges that whatever magic existed is gone. This is like Lewis’s “dumb idols” – the lovers mistook their idealized high-school life for the real thing, and in the end learned the painful truth that those images were only “the echo of a tune we have not heard” or “the scent of a flower we have not found”. Joel never spells this out, but the unfolding story suggests that the emptiness they felt (the “tears” and divorce) was precisely the cry of a deeper longing. In Lewis’s terms, Brenda and Eddie’s joy had “the pang of longing” – an ache that the comforts of marriage couldn’t wholly satisfy.

At the same time, the song recognizes a positive side to this longing. The Italian restaurant itself – “our old familiar place” – is a locus of meaning. Like a sacramental space, it harbors the hope that something good endures. The recurring invitation “I’ll meet you anytime you want” suggests an open-ended yearning: the narrator longs to hold onto his friendship and its shared memories. The bottles of red and white wine might symbolize different moods or choices, but they both point to renewal. Lewis would note that such earthly gatherings are not meaningless. In The Weight of Glory he writes that simple earthly pleasures can become “channels of adoration” if we recognize them as “shafts of the glory” of God. Joel’s characters do not overtly speak of God, but the song implies that their commemoration of the past is, in a sense, a holy moment of honesty. They admit their limitations (they have “got a new wife… new life” in the present) and yet by singing Brenda and Eddie’s story they also honor the innocence and wonder they once knew. The narrative may be tinged with sadness, but it is ultimately told with affection and warmth, as if the act of remembering is a kind of grace.

Even the structure of the song mirrors Lewis’s themes. The swooping changes in tempo and style – from the quiet opening to the jaunty middle section and back to a slow finish – feel like journeying through time. It is as though the listener is guided back and forth between reality and memory, just as Sehnsucht pulls the soul between the here and now and the never-yet. The unresolved ending is particularly telling. Joel does not offer a tidy conclusion; the characters simply leave, with the story of Brenda and Eddie hanging in the air. This lack of closure itself evokes Lewis’s point that our yearnings remain hopes, not certainties. In the final scene they are still “wavin’ Brenda and Eddie goodbye” – and by extension, saying goodbye to that chapter of life. But the song ends by bringing us back to the Italian restaurant table, with the promise that these friends can always return here, at least in memory and fellowship. That resembles Lewis’s advice: cherish the joys you have, but never mistake them for the final rest; rather, let them point you onward.

Conclusion

In sum, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” can be read as a musical parable of Lewis’s Sehnsucht. Joel’s lyrics intertwine nostalgia and sober truth in a way that any Lewis reader would recognize: the recollection of Brenda and Eddie’s golden days brings delight but also a sharp twinge – the knowledge that something intangible has been lost. The song dramatizes Lewis’s idea that our sweetest memories are both balm and spur, reminding us of a sweetness beyond their reach. Just as Lewis urges, the characters in Joel’s song do not despise their memories; rather, they toast them with a bottle of red or white and a knowing smile. Yet they remain aware that “you can never go back there again”. In doing so, the song captures the bittersweet character of Sehnsucht: it honors the past, mourns its passing, and yet gently admits that the true fulfillment lies still ahead, in whatever “country” awaits us.

Sources: Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955); The Weight of Glory (London: Macmillan, 1949). Billy Joel, The Stranger (CBS, 1977), “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (lyrics). Citations are to these works as quoted in secondary sources (see bracketed references).