Desire and Satisfaction

I have long espoused the idea that desiring for an object can be more satisfying than when it is finally being acquired. The longing of something that I have always wanted is often times more pleasurable than when I finally get what I have wanted. This happened to me whether it was a laptop, a piece of jewelry, even an achievement like a degree or a position. (I often used this argument to try to convince my kids not to buy at first impulse, but they don't seem to buy it!) Anyway, I may have found someone who finally echoes with how I feel, and much further beyond. CS Lewis wrote about this "intense longing" in the preface to third edition of Pilgrim Regress:

Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future : hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth.

He even went on to talk about "a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire", that if one were to claim that this object can be acquired, he would be deluding himself ... "that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given". This is what Romanticism is to Lewis.