Sentimentality often gets a bad rap, and thinking about it for a moment it’s not hard to see why.  The word is used disparagingly, indicating a mawkish attachment to things like the fallen out of use “mawkish”.  Sentimentality is usually thought of as wistful nostalgia for things that are no more and can usually never be again.  The sound of a ringing telephone in an old black and white movie, a sound a majority of people alive now have never heard, may raise a sentimental feeling in those of us old enough to remember this familiar old tone.   It used to mean someone (we were never sure who) was calling.  Now, it means little, except as a sentimental trigger to a smaller and smaller group of people.  

And to those who are too young to feel sentimental about the former sound of phone calls, any number of puzzles present themselves, in the odd event they notice and recognize the expressions on old people’s faces when the old tone is sounded.  Why would anyone want to go back to an era before we could know who was calling before deciding whether to pick up the phone?  To an era where we couldn’t choose the way our phone calls would announce themselves, customize the ringtones (which seldom involve a ring) to indicate certain callers.   Why would anyone be sentimental about an antiquated, boring and completely outmoded ringtone?

In extreme cases, which are not at all uncommon, sentimental attachment to things, places or people can be crippling.   Life is change, and change is often very scary, always carrying a whiff, for those with the nose for it, of the final change from life to not life.  Clinging to the familiar is easier by far than embracing the unknowable, and this clinging can take many forms.   The smart women, and men, who make the foolish choice to remain with a complete and enduring asshole who sometimes displays an endearing or redeeming trait.  I’m surprised to see how much of my own inability to move my life most productively forward is hampered by fear of change, of the sometimes irrational desire to preserve things (or at least a paralyzing reluctance to tackle winnowing), such as the perhaps 10,000 drawings that are woven into the shifting wall-to-wall mat of mostly papers covering virtually every surface in my neglected apartment.

I’m thinking of sentimentality at the moment in connection to friendship.   Some friendships are saved out of almost purely sentimental motives.  Not to say that such friendships may not also have valuable aspects, it just causes me to wonder about them.   In moments of solitary self-pity (as opposed to convivial group celebrations of self-pity) things that are basically good are viewed in a purely negative light.   What are we to make of old friends who insist we behave as we always behaved, whatever hard-won changes we may have made in the intervening years or decades?   What about friends who insist on their right to insist on their rights, no matter what the consequences of such insistence are?  Or friends who always serve themselves first, taking a slightly larger portion and making semi-humorous observations about their unflatteringly doglike behavior instead of being more mindful, less selfish?

I wonder, thinking back, about old friends I’m no longer in touch with, people it seemed I might become friends with and never did, new friends I was intrigued by, before they disappeared.  Deep friendship is rare, true enough.  Social friendships are valuable too, for one thing they take us out of our own thoughts for a while and place us in another space where brooding is not much of an option.

And I think sentimentally about a time when I did not see everyone I know or can imagine as some kind of slave, many of them in an almost constant low-grade fury.   This fury may be anger, self-hatred, terror, envy, unslakable thirst for vengeance, denial, an all-consuming sense of inferiority and competition, or what have you.  We humans swim in a sea of it, particularly in our competitive materialistic culture where the war of each against all constantly rages, or however Thomas Hobbes put it.  

Hard sometimes not to be sentimental about my formerly more humane view of the world, when this bracing fact of distracted, fleeting, compulsive life was not so much in evidence.  Look at our nonchalance toward things like torture, mass poverty, mass infant and child death, famine, genocide, out of control greed and destruction for the obscene profit of a very few, our powerlessness and the ways we console ourselves that we are still good people.  

Try not to be sentimental about a time when you may have seen this miraculous world more innocently, and mainly as a world of unlimited potential for miracles.  It is still that, however hard it may sometimes be to see it that way.