October 23, 2024
There’s a weight to certain kinds of desire, a pull that drags you down into yourself. Sometimes it’s a sharp, insistent craving—immediate, burning, like a fleeting storm. Other times, it’s a slow, aching yearning, the kind that stretches out, fills you up, and leaves you feeling emptier than before. And maybe that’s the most painful thing of all, knowing that the thing you long for, the thing you’re reaching for, will never truly be yours.
This post? It’s a reflection inspired by ContraPoints’ video on Twilight, where the strange dance between craving and yearning comes alive through vampires, desire, and the perpetual tragedy of wanting. There’s a darkness here that isn’t just about forbidden love—it’s about the black hole that desire creates, and how we orbit it endlessly, pulled in but never fully consumed.
Craving is easy to understand. It’s the sharp, gnawing hunger that demands to be fed. You crave food, alcohol—something you can reach for and take. But the thing about craving is that once you have it, it leaves you hollow, like a wave that crashes and pulls everything back out to sea. It’s a quick fix, but the emptiness that follows is worse than the hunger itself.
In Twilight, Edward’s craving for Bella’s blood is this kind of desire. It’s raw, unrelenting, and primal. He wants her, needs her, but he knows that giving in will destroy them both. It’s lust, in its most destructive form. Shakespeare understood this perfectly in Sonnet 129:
"Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust."
Craving is savage. It’s fleeting. It’s something that burns bright, burns out, and leaves you scorched in the aftermath. And Edward’s constant battle with this craving is what makes him so tragic—it’s a hunger that can never be sated, and the very act of feeding it would mean his own destruction.
Yearning, though, is something different. It’s quieter, deeper, and far more dangerous. Yearning isn’t about getting something right now; it’s about a longing that consumes you slowly, making you ache for something you know you can never truly have. It’s that cold, hollow space inside you that only grows the more you try to fill it.
In Twilight, Edward doesn’t just crave Bella’s blood. He yearns for her love, for a life where he could be with her without the constant threat of losing control. But it’s more than that. His yearning is tied to something deeper—a longing for redemption, for a sense of belonging in a world that feels as empty and endless as his own immortality.
Shakespeare captures this perfectly in Sonnet 147:
"My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease."
Yearning is a fever that never breaks, a desire that never ends. It’s the kind of longing that twists itself into your bones, and no matter how much you reach, no matter how close you get, it slips through your fingers. It’s what makes Edward’s love for Bella so painful, so heartbreaking—it’s not just about wanting her; it’s about wanting a life he knows he can never have. And that kind of yearning, the kind that lives in the spaces between what you want and what’s real, is what slowly tears you apart.
Twilight gives us this haunting interplay between craving and yearning, two sides of the same endless coin. Edward craves Bella’s blood, something he could take and destroy, but he yearns for her love, something that feels just out of reach. That’s where the tragedy lies—in the tension between immediate satisfaction and eternal longing.
As ContraPoints points out, craving is about the now, while yearning is about the future, the "what if." Edward is constantly pulled between the two—between what he wants to devour and what he can never truly possess. It’s that push and pull, that dance between destruction and desire, that keeps the story alive.
There’s a line from Seinfeld that ContraPoints quotes that nails this feeling:
"Have you yearned? Yearn, do I yearn? Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving. But I haven’t yearned."
Edward lives in both states. He craves Bella’s blood, but his yearning for her—her soul, her love, her trust—is what drives him deeper into his own despair. Because when you yearn for something you can’t have, it stops being about the object of desire and starts becoming about the void it leaves inside you.
What makes yearning so intoxicating is the anticipation, the endless "what could be." ContraPoints touches on this beautifully when she talks about vorfreude, the German word for the pleasure of looking forward to something. It’s the sweet poison of hope—the feeling that maybe, just maybe, you’ll get what you’re reaching for this time.
But deep down, you know you won’t. You know that the thing you want is always just beyond your grasp, and that’s where the real pain comes from. As Keats wrote in Ode on a Grecian Urn:
"Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"
The lover on the urn will never reach his beloved, just as Edward will never fully escape his own nature. Yearning thrives in that space between what you want and what you can never have. It’s why Edward’s love for Bella is so charged—it’s the tension, the waiting, the aching for something that always feels just out of reach.
In the end, craving is about feeding a hunger that will never be full, while yearning is about living in the ache of something you’ll never quite touch. Twilight captures both perfectly—Edward’s craving for Bella’s blood is immediate, raw, and destructive, but his yearning for her love is what truly breaks him. It’s that hollow, endless space inside him that drives the story forward.
And maybe that’s the thing about desire. Sometimes we crave because it’s simple, because it’s a quick fix. But when we yearn, when we truly yearn, it’s not about having something—it’s about living with the pain of wanting. It’s about letting the ache fill you up until there’s nothing left but the empty space it leaves behind.
So, the next time you feel that deep, hollow pull inside you, ask yourself: Is this a craving that will pass? Or is it a yearning that will stay with you, lingering, haunting, pulling you further into yourself?
Because in the end, maybe the saddest thing about yearning is that we never really want it to stop.
And as ContraPoints might say: the sweetest suffering is always found in the yearning.