To feel sentimental is to indulge in an a filtered version of emotion, without complexity, It’s the equivalent of refined white flour, with all the germ stripped out. It makes for lovely, puffy and light pastries, but contains practically no nutrition.
Duke Ellington played lovely music to the lyrics of the song In A Sentimental Mood, but when the words, written by Manny Kurtz, are read without any music playing, they seem absurd, a vision of love that can’t possibly last longer than one inebriated hour: “In a sentimental mood I can see the stars come through my room while your loving attitude is like a flame that lights the gloom. On the wings of every kiss drifts a melody so strange and sweet. In this sentimental bliss you make my paradise complete. Rose petals seem to fall. It’s all I could dream to call you mine. My heart’s a lighter thing since you made this night a thing divine. In a sentimental mood I’m within a world so heavenly…”
Those who have experienced such moments sincere sentimentality often wake up with a headache afterwards, and find shriveled, blackened rose petals behind the curtains and under the bed long after the initial burst of feeling is gone. Heaven on earth wakes up with morning breath and bed hair, and needs to get its clothes on in a hurry so as not to be late for work.
Oscar Wilde wrote that to be sentimental is to pretend that we can have emotions without paying for them. Wilde wrote this from prison, where he was being punished for his homosexual relationships. He knew the heavy price that emotion demands.
You want love? You’d better be ready to deal with irritation and sacrifice, because nobody can be lovely all the time. You want happiness? Prepare yourself for disappointment and emptiness, because the happening of it all is ephemeral.
Sentimentality is a true emotion, in the moment, but it is a peak that cannot be sustained. Despite the hype of behavioral economics, it turns out that peak experiences are not all that define us. We are also defined by those feelings that easily linger, like regret.
We despise expressions of sentimental emotions, but let’s be honest enough to admit where our contempt comes from. We have been immersed in that same glorious, sugary sentimentality ourselves, and hate it now only because we understand that even as it whispered sweet words of forever in our ears, it was preparing to leave us behind. We feel ridiculous every time we are reminded that we believed.
