That's what Fragonard's painting The Swing is about – the wonderful joke of the painting is that while the man tries to sneak a look up the swinging woman's skirts, Fragonard's receding, melting, luxuriant garden landscape gives the painting's beholder a sensory evocation of all he longs to see.
In times like these there are particular voices one longs to hear.
The president longs for the Nobel peace prize.He is no crude dictator.
He longs for a day when "you might be a redneck if... ...... jokes have punchlines like: "You hold six patents and each used the term 'hunting dog' in the disclosure documents".
ARKANSAS longs for other Americans to forget its hillbilly-and-moonshine reputation.
And Mr Medvedev's supposed plans for reform and strengthening the rule of law are in about the same shape as Georgia's beaten army.But what Russia may come to regret losing most is something Mr Putin longs for: the opportunity to become an accepted European power.
In a moment of despair, he longs to return to the honest purity of his home state, "away from the words and the monuments and the whole rotten show .In the past fortnight, America has replayed this perennial drama: but the roles have been reversed.
Only then can it become the urbanised, modernised nation it longs to be, and only then can the Chinese Dream become reality.Correction: This article originally said that only 36% of people who live in cities qualify as residents there.
He is physically distant, too, confessing he has "barely crossed the threshold of a private residence in Dubai".[p 10] He longs "for the experience of being made welcome by a family in its domain"[p 149], but considers himself toxic: "I'm like those thin-skinned smoke detectors that screech at the presence of the slightest cooking fume, and if life is to go on, must be shut down"[p 157].
Harriet longs to cast off her humdrum existence as a governess.
To achieve that, she longs to see Mr McConnell (whose own fans call him a canny and ruthless partisan operator) win another term and take control of the Senate, three decades after he was first sent there.Asked, politely, why she thought a 30-year veteran might shake up Washington, Ms Silver admitted that Mr McConnell's elevation "might not change a whole lot".
