As a general principle, emotions cannot be made subject to mathematical assessment. To say that someone is 32.764 percent happy is to misunderstand the experience of happiness.
Nonetheless, mathematical measurements can provide metaphorical heft to an emotion. When someone says, “I love you a ton,” we understand that there is not a mass of two thousand pounds of love somewhere, ready to be placed on a scale. The ton is an allusion to an impressive, immovable, potentially crushing amount of a feeling that is in reality beyond measure.
So it is with distance in the emotion of longing.
Fred Astaire once crooned Cole Porter’s lyrics:
Night and day, why is it so that this longing for you follows wherever I go, in the roaring traffic’s boom in the silence of my lonely room? I think of you night and day.
There is for the singer no escaping the feeling of separation from the beloved. The feeling of longing remains constant, whether we move through traffic, or remain still in a lonely room. The fact that the lonely room is 4.3 miles away from the singer’s beloved, while that distance within traffic’s boom changes by the minute, is irrelevant. The intensity emotion remains the same.
That’s because the distance of separation from the person, place, or thing that we desire but cannot be with is more qualitative than quantitative. It’s a distance that exists in a physically unreal but nonetheless actual space of subjective perceptions.
Most tragically, longing can be felt even we are in the presence of that which we long for. Emotional distance can feel insurmountable even when we stand right before what we wish for.
We feel the length of that distance without measuring it, which is why we don’t talk about different lengths of longing. If we were to say, “I long for her, but she shorts for me,” people might understand what we’re saying, but only in a cute kind of playing with words sort of way.
Distance grows between us, but never in inches, feet, or miles.
