Longing for joy

C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory says,

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... Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But... if Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself... 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 was only longing. If these things are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. 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... But if we are to take the imagery of Scripture seriously, we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun... At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or the greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch... Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.