What Is Sentimental?

Well, now " emotionally promiscuous" comes to mind. Lol

Good to know you've been reading my quotes ... thanks Janine..

I had to choke on that Mailer quote Re; sentimentality - after I stated that I was not romantic - but sentimental, in the prior thread.

Oh well, it's under the Artistic license - right to be flaky

Yes I was holding onto this one since you said it...lol

Hmmmm. This one is harder for me. What do you think is this "sentimental" art or simply a moment of emotional weakness on my part.

I like it...

Love letters, photo albums, keepsakes, list goes on :) These days... text messages from a lover and Instagram photos I guess... lol

Watered down version of romantic. Can make me cry easily but forget it just as easily...i think. Like a chick flick. an old song. an old photo, or saying, seeing someone in the street who reminds you of someone you knew, a revisited place...that kind of thing.

Not really romantic, since it does not need to include the notion of romance/eros. Sentimental can include other dimensions, such as nostalgia, or the "rose colored glasses" of a strong positive bias, or missing anything that you formerly enjoyed in the past.

sen·ti·men·tal
/ˌsentəˈmentl/
Adjective

Of or prompted by feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia: "she felt a sentimental attachment to the place creep over her".
(of a work of literature, music, or art) Dealing with feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia in an exaggerated and self-indulgent...

Synonyms
maudlin - mushy - emotional - sensitive

A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought—the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul—and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.
Oscar Wilde

A Romantic lives each moment with certain ideals. Being sentimental is a feeling triggered by attachment, usually to past emotion. I find overly sentimental people have a tendency for depression, while Romantics are optimistic.

I loath sentimentality in the media and art..like object relationship.. you can always get a laugh out of a dirty joke from a school kid....nostalgia is a symptom of depression ... romantics can get melancholy ...

To me, being sentimental is a more emotionally attached version of being nostalgic. I agree with what Karen said about being sentimental and how it's triggered by attachment.

Romance worthy, but sentimentality not ?

I find so much more worth in a "magic" rock that a 3 yr old has gifted me with - than a dozen roses for Valentines day that cost a small fortune, when that $ could have been used to spend on a shared life experience making more memories..

Maybe that makes me more of a "romantic"..........

Man, oh Man! "nostalgia is a symptom of depression ... romantics can get melancholy ..." Robert, with all due respect. I am sentimental and have NEVER been depressed or leaned towards depression in my life. While this may be true for some, you cannot pigeonhole people.

For me, being sentimental is keeping my memories close to my heart. (edited)

I live in my childhood home...have for 55 years now. This house was remodeled by my father and stepfather. My mother LOVED and was happy in this old home. When the state took the property by eminent domain to build yet another highway off ramp in the late 50s, my mother, a widow at 33 with three young children, moved this house to its current location. I LOVE this old home.

Every room is filled with memories. My children's rooms remain their bedrooms. My room became my daughter's room and will eventually become her oldest daughter's. Every wall is covered with artwork with stories to tell. Outside, trees were planted with our names. My youngest brother's tree is in the front yard. It's now 48 years old. As long as I breathe, that tree will stand unless nature says otherwise. The wishing well my stepfather built serves as a planter. The stone wall with dirt in the middle also serves as a place for me to plant marigolds (his favorite) to honor my stepfather every summer. The shed, where I played as a child, although remodeled, still stands.

I still have my first doll, my one and only doll from my childhood. It was given to me the Christmas when I was eight years old. It was my father's last Christmas. I have a stocking doll I made from my bobby socks that was to rest with my father. My aunt never followed through with my wishes and returned it to me when I turned 21 and married. I treasure it. I have my parents old scrapbooks, documents, and photos which give me a sense of their lives. I could go on and on and on.

Yes, I am sentimental, nostalgic, happy, and not depressed. I feel I have been blessed in this lifetime.

Janine wrote: "I find so much more worth in a "magic" rock that a 3 yr old has gifted me with - than a dozen roses for Valentines day that cost a small fortune, when that $ could have been used to spend on a shared life experience making more memories."

Total agreement, Janine. As I type, I'm staring at a purple pet rock that has a home on my desk. My daughter gave me this rock when she was in grade school. She is now 36 years old.

I second that WELL said Janine....as always .

Isn't being sentimental indulging into the past?

Thanx m'ladies !

But we are "the nesters", so we would feel quite differerantly than what most men would feel comfortable with.

& I got that purple rock too Janice !

Sydne, you can embrace the past, carry on in the present, and still look to the future.

Traditions continue by remembering the past, or sometimes, the simpliest of gestures makes us smile by taking us back into our past. My mother would sometimes sit in her chair with her index finger on her face and thumb beneath her chin as if she were holding up her face. Sometimes I find myself doing the same. It makes me smile.

I'm so happy I got the juice pumping in this discussion but, there maybe some misunderstanding here in your own personal definition of what sentimental is to you... sentimentality is an over simplification of real emotion.Like cute pictures of pussy cats that make you go ahhh yet you see a homeless person in the street and go yuch..You want feeling without having to pay a price for them.....gifts have nothing to do with this. when I say a romantic I don't mean romance, as a matter of fact a romantic might have trouble being what someone else thinks of as romantic...Nostalgia is clinically considered a symptom of depression it's not pigeonholing anyone... If I wanted to do that I would do a better job of it... You all talk of the past, that is instinctual ,you experience it in your gut" remember when'', the present is in the heart, that is how do" I Feel Right Now!", "what if?" is the future and that is in the head it is fear..This issue is not gender related although many men tend to experience things in the "what if?" world so do many women..

from wiki'
A 17th Century medical student coined the term "nostalgia" for anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home, although some military doctors believed their problems were specific to the Swiss and caused by the Alpine racket of cowbells

I don't think it's over-simplification of real emotion. It can be. But sentiment about your children, your wife, you parents and siblings, and all the people and experiences that you truly and deeply love is normal. Anybody who cannot be sentimental might not be completely normal, might be, in some degree a sociopath. Sentiment, not to excess, merely means that you have emotional ties to your world, past and present that color and soften your perceptions.

Gregory, there is a difference between sentiment and sentimentality... a sociopath blames the world for their life situation and lacks empathy of any kind..empathy is very real and many have trouble with it..like when seeing a homeless person

Only in connotation, not so much in denotion, Robert. But you're right. I've corrected my prior comment to make it say "sentiment", not sentimentality.

wiki again;
Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason.[1]
Sentimentalism in philosophy is a view in meta-ethics according to which morality is somehow grounded in moral sentiments or emotions. Sentimentalism in literature is both a device used to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand,[2] (and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments), and a heightened reader response willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation.[3]
"A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."[4] In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dadalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegraph that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." [5] James Baldwin considered that 'Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty'.[6]

purely idealized perhaps

art is many things but unnecessary sentimentality

ah yes the artistic platitudes

and the vanishing point....................................................................

Aaahhh... I think that is the "problem". Emotions are not an absolute. We can't just "plug in" & compare what we each feel - or the convenience of the word we ( may mistakenly) attach to it.

Philosophical definitions are not the common use of a cultures definition.


(shaking my head, " I'm so confused.... I may have it all wrong......" Lol )

Janine, it's the changing cultural definitions that fascinate me..Yes it's a lot to wrap our heads around when we are so programed by a media that is constantly in our face telling us what and how to feel or desire...
Philip not sure if it's two personalities becoming one as much as the two experiencing one another

I avoid the media as much as possible, too many voices running through my head.
The weather channel is about the only thing of use to me.
This conversation would have been of great use to me prior to the holidays - I tend to end up resenting their presence due to the forced sentimentality.
It is very difficult to always feel out of step with society - but I expect that, that is the curse of an Artist.

being out of step can give one the chance to see where it is that others are going..it can be a good thing..

Ok, I think I may be very intrigued by this.
Gives me new "reads", & insight to other's behaviours. Very very interesting.....

sentimental art bullies you into feeling certain emotions.....

My dog Scooter died 3 weeks ago...

I'm sorry Hal, I grieved intensely for my last dog for about a week then I was able to let go of it... I don't want another dog not because I'm afraid of the loss but because I don't think any other dog would compare... He was one of a kind...

To me it is a loving embrace of a memory that you have stored close to your heart.

-Peter

peter is that memory not distorted over time?

Robert, I think that may well be the case for many people. I'd rather think those memories evolve verses distort as your own life is impacted by trimuph and tragedy. Possibly, a one time fond memory or sentiment, becomes forgettable based on something that happens to someone/thing important to you.

-Peter

Hal, I don't have any dogs but have had several dog nephews. Over the years, my sister and family have lost three goldens. They are always a two-dog family. While it doesn't erase the pain, it helps lessen the blow. My brother just recently lost his beloved black lab. Too sudden, too young. He told me he hadn't bawled like a baby since our mother died. He recently got another lab.

There are a few very special people in my life who have left this world .. They will always be there to teach me through their memory as they did when they were alive but I am wary of idealizing them.. the real person is good enough... flaws and all

...........

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality..... William S Burroughs

1937...

The words of the great poet "Pablo Neruda"

excellent...

Thank you RJ if you are referring to my contributions:

I've already shared a song, a poem on the subject...to close, allow me to share an image of a Spanish Artist :-)...

I like Leonard...

"Fado"....the Music of a Nation (Portugal)

Sentimental?

Oxo, was that really Andy Garcia or you, it sounded just like you. Loved it. :)) If that's being sentimental, then I'm afraid i am sentimental....

María LOL :-) Definately Andy :-)...

Is all music enjoyed by sentimentalists, because as soon as we hear soemthing really good, it takes us on a journey...doesn't it ?

@Maria, I love music and poetry...I don't know if that makes me a sentimental...but without it...

This one is me....Sentimental? Perhaps a bit :-)



"Heartbeat by heartbeat"

With an open heart...
heartbeat by heartbeat...
you arise from silence...
invade my senses...
are you fear...or insanity?
are you light...or a want?
perhaps shadows...or an evening dusk...

How difficult to embrace not knowing...
To read the eyes of those you do not see...

How to smile to the unknown...
when you say that there is no path...
and that only by not walking I can get lost?

But yes...walk...I walked...
And yet, knowing that I don't know...

In each step there is a new dawn.

From Brazil...Marisa Monte, "Dance of Solitude"...

From Spain...Buika..."Jodida pero contenta" (Fucked by happy)

This is where sentimental gets interesting. If it is a need...to be sentimental...then what really is sentimental...i think it was Greg who split the word up to show its root, so, 'sent i mental'...seems to me, something sent through the mind...or travelled through the mind...but what exactly is travelling to the mind...or is it the journeying of the mind...when it is awoken by something like music.
Or is the song making us travel back to where we first heard it? But, when I first heard Adele sing someone like you...i felt sentimental, I'd never heard it before so it wasn't the words, exactly, i felt it was more the deep tones and long notes, and admittedly a kind of drawn out longing, but often we are not aware of why we are moved/sentimental, we just are. Maybe its just the awesomness of life and all the unanswered questions.

Oxo, loved your poem, yes sentimental, I think we should not be worried about admitting to being sentimental, afterall, its not the whole sum of a person, its just one of the pieces that make up the whole. Now that I understand sentimental a bit better, i will never feel embarrassed about admitting it again. Thanks Robert for putting the question out there.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxBcO4DLaGc

If I wasn't sentimental would i feel the same about music played on the mandolin?????????????

@Maria "This is where sentimental gets interesting. If it is a need...to be sentimental...then what really is sentimental...i think it was Greg who split the word up to show its root, so, 'sent i mental'...seems to me, something sent through the mind...or travelled through the mind...but what exactly is travelling to the mind...or is it the journeying of the mind...when it is awoken by something like music."

Very interesting observation, what would come first would be sent (feeling) I mental (mind).....Hmmm I believe some music and poetry goes straight to the soul before the mind kicks in...

I am sorry for all this music sharing...I didn't mean to hijack the thread...but one for the road, from France, Charles Aznavour, La Boheme....might say it all :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxBcO4DLaGc

Looks like we've both hijacked the discussion haha. How sentimental is this...I was given a mandolin for my birthday because after seeing captain Corellis mandolin I couldn't get the tune out of my head...I am hopeless at playing, but taught myself a few tunes, its the most beautiful sound..and yes...it reaches the mind lastly it seems.

Really enjoyed la Boheime, never heard it before, though i like Aznavore. Now, listening to this, I was moved and began to think is this sentimental or romantic, as there is something more dramatic about it, its that fine line again between romantic and sentimental. But I may be talking rubbish, I'm just trying to nuzzle it out.

That was lovely, the mandolin as far as sentimental is up there with the violin :-)

I wasn't going to post more videos but I will leave it with this that goes straight to my soul too, from fellow Galician, Amancio Prada, poet and singer song writer....

What instrument is that, it has a sound similiar to bagpipes, NOW bagpipes are sentimental, and one of the most sentimental tunes....the last post, but for obvious reasons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TYxY9xORbM

My final sentimental tune is this one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=N82wNJFVeK8

In Galicia is called a "Zanfoña" not sure in english, it's a medieval instrument.

On bagpipes...the Galicians play the bagpipe, some call us the Irish of Spain (like the Irish many millions have also emigrated all over the place, some joke that there is a Galician in the moon)...Here's a Master Galician Piper, Carlos Nuñez, playing with the Chieftains a traditional Galician song...

Wonderful! well, just had to post this....always makes me cry....as a scene of my dad and brothers singing together vividly comes to me...sent i mental! Straight from the feeling to the mind and memories :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVUNbNp6Ct4&list=AL94UKMTqg-9ADVE0PNCgeOkC0EIViJgma

18th century origins

In the mid-18th century, a querulous lady had complained to Richardson: "What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party".[7] What she was observing was the way the term was becoming a European obsession[8] - part of the Enlightenment drive to foster the individual's capacity to recognise virtue at a visceral level.[9] Everywhere in the sentimental novel or the sentimental comedy, 'lively and effusive emotion is celebrated as evidence of a good heart'.[10] Moral philosophers saw sentimentality as a cure for social isolation;[11] and Adam Smith indeed considered that "the poets and romance writers, who best paint...domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno"[12] and the Stoics.
By the close of the century, however, a reaction had occurred against sentimental excess, now seen as false and self-indulgent - especially after Schiller's division (1795) of poets into two classes, the "naive" and the "sentimental": natural and artificial.[10]

Sentiment is real,
Sentimental is emotional manipulation...






You are being sold because someone knows your "sentimental triggers"

Modern times

In modern times[13] "sentimental" is a pejorative term that has been casually applied to works of art and literature that exceed the viewer or reader's sense of decorum—the extent of permissible emotion—and standards of taste: "excessiveness" is the criterion;[14] "Meretricious" and "contrived" sham pathos are the hallmark of sentimentality, where the morality that underlies the work is both intrusive and pat.[citation needed]
'Sentimentality often involves situations which evoke very intense feelings: love affairs, childbirth, death', but where the feelings are expressed with 'reduced intensity and duration of emotional experience...diluted to a safe strength by idealisation and simplification'.[15]
Nevertheless, as a social force sentimentality is a hardy perennial, appearing for example as 'Romantic sentimentality...in the 1960s slogans "flower power" and "make love not war"'.[16] The 1990s public outpouring of grief at the death of Diana, 'when they go on about fake sentimentality in relation to Princess Diana',[17] also raised issues about the 'powerful streak of sentimentality in the British character' - the extent to which 'sentimentality was a grand old national tradition'.[18]
Baudrillard has cynically attacked the sentimentality of Western humanitarianism, suggesting that 'in the New Sentimental Order, the affluent become consumers of the "ever more delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own attempts to alleviate it"'.[19] There is also the issue of what has been called 'indecent sentimentality...[in] pornographical pseudo-classics', so that one might say for example that ' Fanny Hill is a very sentimental novel, a faked Eden'.[20]

Well, yes there is sentiment and sentimental, the first one is a noun and the second an adjective.

Sentimental by the Oxford Dictionary derives from from feelings of tenderness, sadness or nostalgia. Can also be used as having or arousing such feelings in an exaggerated and self-indulgent way.

The adjective does not necessarily only points towards its second use. It very much depends how and when the word is used, as with many words :-). One should not exclude nor judge erroneously when used to point towards its core and basic definition. It is human to feel tenderness, sadness and nostalgic.

This is an extract from an article I wrote in my FB page Camino a Utopia. It refers to Love but I would say that applies to the origin of the word sentiment (OD. Origin: in the senses "personal experience" and physical feeling, sensation). We may feel before the logical mind tries to understand what is it and how to recreate it, this may also be "sentimental".

"Reason is powerless in the expression of Love".( Rumi)

Although changes are unavoidable, despite the mind’s efforts to conceptually fixate, a fundamental and significant transformation may not be acknowledged until human mind perception realigns itself with a transformed human consciousness that regains its lost touch with other crucial areas of the ´human being´ construct, the illogic and unreasonable realm where its life experience takes place, the ´being´ part.

Aided by internet, I researched across 26 centuries of what we consider relevant human thought and its conclusions in the space of just a few hours, touching concepts, theories and thoughts (albeit only in the surface, by focusing on their conclusions) as varied as those of John Nash, Albert Einstein, Kenneth Waltz, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau…all the way to Aristotle and beyond. What became apparent from this research was a long history of the human mind’s emphasis on logic and reason in what seems to be a complete disregard for the validity of the illogic and unreasonable, as if these were no part of, or of no value to the human experience. As Kant says: “Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of human reason” (1993, p.3; first published 1781, quoted in S. Bromley and M.J.Smith, 2004).

However, “Love”, what I consider to be the most fundamental experience any human being can have, springs precisely from this realm, the illogic, the unreasonable, although it may seem irrelevant to the mind’s experience, because the closest it can come to understand its very nature, it would be from its own version, “want”, that derives from fear and drives towards a false idea of security and well-being, while Love supported by Faith (reason, as explained, is of no value), flows in the complete absence of Fear.

(Camino a Utopia)

I suppose even the love I feel for my child in some ways defies logic..Yet the affection I feel for my dead dog does not defy my logic.. I know he was an animal that had a certain life span that is normal and part of life.. His feelings and mine are not as deep as that of my own flesh and blood and to try and put that affection into that realm would be pure self indulgent sentimentality .. To use that connection in art is the easy way.. The lose of a child would never inspire that easy sympathy from others..They would not know what to say because the pain they might have to experience in connection to such an experience would be more than they could handle.

RJ, Here you are making a very valid difference ... "pure self indulgent sentimentality" is of course not the same as "sentimental".

"Love" defies "Logic", "Want" doesn't!!!

*Edit to add:

RJ, "The lose of a child would never inspire that easy sympathy from others..They would not know what to say because the pain they might have to experience in connection to such an experience would be more than they could handle."

At least so as entertainment...but I still can not understand how people enjoy horror movies and recreating sensations of extreme fear for entertainment purposes....But then again, Euripide's "Medea" comes to mind...

I am not immune to sentiment even to the point of an occasional sentimental moment, however I think it can be a slippery slope from what is real...I avoid it at all cost in my work...

XO wrote "but I still can not understand how people enjoy horror movies and recreating sensations of extreme fear for entertainment purposes."

I think this may be a symptom of human nature in our modern time that may actually crave REAL life drama and isn't getting it or isn't truly experiencing it so they have to make it up, it is artificial even in it's recreation of terror..I also think of the teenager who thinks their puppy love broken heart is the end of the world when in reality it's a new wonderful beginning .

Sentimental = having strong feelings that attach a person to something, thus creating a sense of possession that defies the laws of nature, where everything constantly changes, and yet sentiment fights this dynamic. Sentiment is a consequence of mortality, a limited time of life, which creates a continual sense of impending loss that drives a deeply sentimental person.

Robert K. "Sentiment is a consequence of mortality"???

Only in as much as any human experience may be!!!

As I mentioned in a previous post:

The origin of the word sentiment (Oxford Dictionary. Origin: in the senses "personal experience" and physical feeling, sensation). But I invite you to check the definition of "Sentiment" and judge by yourself how accurate your post might be!!!

Please also note the difference between "Sentimental" and as you mention "Deeply Sentimental".

I like RJ, am not immune to "sentiment" nor I think anyone can be. There is always a time and place for each human experience!!!

Enjoyed reading the intelligent exchanges.
If people watch horror movies because they crave reality..or something real, then maybe they watch sentimental movies because they crave reality. In their reality ( I'm sure we all have a different one) something exciting is missing, i read somewhere once that it is better to feel pain than nothing, as when you feel pain at least you know that you are alive. To be scared, frightened, even terrified and to feel tears run down your face, a lump in your throat, an aaahhh! maybe it all just makes you feel alive when nothing much is happening. If we had vey strong senses in the beginning, to help us survive, and the became more comfortaable, less reliant on them, maybe we are just expressing the innate need to use them.

Maria,
This forced reality, is dangerous, it is what desentsitizes kids to violence in video games and movies. With no effort of their own, they can achieve, despair, and start again. All the time not learning what it "really" means to lose life or limb. They get an adrenaline rush without leaving the couch.

Sentimentality is as dangerous, do we need to wonder why people are afraid of intimacy? When they have the sentimental images, why do they need to burden themselves with real love which can cause real pain?

In the sculpture world sentimentality plays a big role. Many modern sculptors I've noticed shun anything which could be determined to be having elements of sentimentality. It's considered a mantle of amateurism by some. I think this is more about cute puppy-kitten type stuff. Barn paintings or Norman Rockwell style pictures might be sentimental work. Since a lot of modern art is void of sentimental feeling there may some truth the this.

Penny, I agree with you. In the more comfortable world for some/many we are experiencing emotions and feeling through other less real ways.
Infact, there's been a great dumbing down, i think, in showing emotions.
As far as experiencing emotions in the real world, not everyone feels in a position to do this, broken relationships, lonliness etc. It is just to the degree that the the relience is on the likes of reality tv or violent movies.

I recall being terrified when as a teenager I watched the exorcist, these days the teenagers think it is so funny.

nteresting Vincent. I will be looking for evidence of this :)

XC - "The origin of the word sentiment (Oxford Dictionary. Origin: in the senses "personal experience" and physical feeling, sensation). But I invite you to check the definition of "Sentiment" and judge by yourself how accurate your post might be!!! "

Note the emphasis on "physical feeling", "sensation".

RK - "Sentimental = having strong feelings that attach a person to something, thus creating a sense of possession that defies the laws of nature, where everything constantly changes, and yet sentiment fights this dynamic. Sentiment is a consequence of mortality, a limited time of life, which creates a continual sense of impending loss that drives a deeply sentimental person."

Note my use of "strong feelings", which certainly seems in accord with yours, XC. I merely point to an extension of the idea of feelings and senses as aspects of mortality, namely the aspect that these things are temporary for any individual, sensing-feeling being, and it is the limitation on life that causes these senses-feelings to have a somewhat impending sense of loss always associated with them, either consciously or subconsciously.

I do not believe that this thread was calling for a purely terse dictionary definition. I believe it was calling for answers to the implied question, "What is sentimental to YOU."

Thanks RK,

@Rk "I do not believe that this thread was calling for a purely terse dictionary definition. I believe it was calling for answers to the implied question, "What is sentimental to YOU."

You are right, my apologies for that!!! But when you say "I merely point to an extension of the idea of feelings and senses as aspects of mortality" the opposite can be just as true, feelings and senses are as much an aspect of being alive, and while life bears the seed of death they should not be confused.

Like Vincent says, Sentimentality might play a negative role in certain contemporary views, but I think it was Carl Jung who said something like or words to this effect (I won't check wiki) "all that is repressed will eventually find its way out" . Personally, I am very weary of fashion and I try to avoid fall on its traps, specially when I am told that my natural tendencies don't fit with current trends. Human beings are sentient beings, not all we feel obeys logic nor adheres to restraining socially imposed or accepted behaviours. I am no sentimental, romantic, nostalgic passionate nor idealist but can feel sentimental, romantic, nostalgic, passionate and consider some ideals more fitting than others.

All these emotions, energy frequencies, sensations, etc... exist because they form part of the human experience of "Life", just like awareness of our Mortality.

Back to Vincent's point on the sentimental in art I would have to agree, I think that in using an object and ones relationship to it like say an old barn, truck, tools, pet, (you name it) is using the objects sentimental connection to inspire easy sympathy or sentimentality and runs the risk of being schmaltzy..

yes. Maybe it's selfish -- attaching meaning or value to something that has little meaning or value to anyone else.

Sorry treble post.

I disagree with taking the easy way out by being sentimental about something...not really feeling it...because it was felt once...usually....lisstening to the song danny Boy...takes me to a place that can never be again...when i hear the song...I remember the touch of my father like it is happening right there and then....i am not really feeling it...but it reminds me...of the deep unconditional love...before that moment of sentimentality...i may have been having a real..mundane day, or just a good day, an exhausting day....lets say...an alive day...then I happen to hear that song from someone's car....and it reminds me...that i am not alive enough....i begin to feel strong..and inspired...and many other things...that were real once...and through sentiment are again...but its no easy way out from really experiencing life....because i may remember how generous he was....and stop to throw 10 dollars in the homeless woman's dish....or have a bit more patience with a young girl, becaus ehe had patience with me...i could go on and on....

I am reminded of who i am and what's possible...and where and who i came from...and am thankful....i could have been the woman on the street.....i could also have had a privileged life, but I'm not and I havn't....but when I hear Danny Boy, I can feel real love...even though it is not happening now. i am reminded to pass on the good things in life, the good things that i was taught, sentimentality may have been one of them.

maybe out of sentiment, this discussion has inspired me to produce an art piece completely bereft of sentimentality.....i admit, I can almost feel the strength in the piece already, even though it is only an idea just now, but maybe that's because I'm just very sentimental.....at times!

Robert H
Do you have any object around your place of sentimental value?

Words from a craggy old coot.

A geezer who has prided himself as a clear thinking soul, devoid of any degree of sentimentality.( Who else would have devoted his life, throwing renditions of Vultures in the faces of ordinary people?)...Someone that has been to others "impossible to live with"...Someone that had been living a good part of each year as a hermit, picking and choosing the time and place to leave the cave to socialize with the rest of the world.

Well, this "individual" has to confess, that throughout his years has had bouts of nostalgia, wallowing in the thick sweet goo. This stickyness might be brought on by the change of the color of a leaf, a waft of warm spring air or a tune from the past (ex: "A Summer Place")...He has assiduously pulled himself out of this mire, though, when these occasions happened.

And now, as a result of Sandy's Wrath, and after 2 months sleeping on friends and family couches , he finds himself now, comfortably surrounded by as many of the sentimental doo-dads of his life,that he could scavenge from the oil soaked muck of his "waterfront" property, in a new home (provisional ?) far from the ocean.

He's been told by others, to get rid of all that "shit "and start fresh again.

Go figure.

Maria, I have a few things, plain old good coffee and an old fashion stove percolator an old gun but they are more attached to another life style than another specific person.I don't keep many things other than my art materials and art. I can't think of many specific objects or songs that " bring me back". I have an emotional amnesia I think..But that is aside from what my point was....I was saying using sentimental object relation in art (images) is an easy way to inspire sympathy ... I have old songs and movies that I love but I don't really go back as much as I go into the fantasy...

So good to see you Roger, we've been worried about you

Philip, I'm sorry I didn't get that much out of his work but than again I never appreciated Butoh either... Have met and seen masters perform and found them pretentious ...

so discernment has no value?

so are you saying I'm a lazy self serving art enthusiast ? because I don't appreciate an artists work?

oh i like the lazy self serving art enthusiast better...

just about anything human is of sentimental value. The cold calculating scientists try to avoid it but then this is their failure because that lonely and abused Chimpanzee strapped to a stainless steel tank for the sake of some nothing experiment has reason to dissolve all experimentation with animals, especially near human animals like the great apes. The pharmacy industry is active in this inhumane activity as we speak.

Would my vintage photo of my grandparents be a sentimental photo. This was taken pre World War I

it might be to you but to me it is time piece...wonderful

I think it's a wonderful sentimental timepiece.michael do you know anything about the situation. Is the reality that because they were young and in love, and, had children, grandchildren and great grandchildren maybe, justify it being sentimental. Can sentimentality be removed by an onlooker?
Can anyone admit to never being sentimental?
'it's what you put into it.......
Yes....like someone may look at robert's great paintings and feel sentimental, even though he did everything to avoid sentimentality.
Not picking on you robert btw.

Bittersweett fool and flowers grave are amazing artworks as you said yourself you can't separate the artist from he art in this one.......do I detect some sentiment in those words robert.....as Vincent said....we can choose to fight it but it is a human facet.....sorry about grammar but I'm using an iPad...

Thank you Maria, I would say that those paintings were a form of rumination or lament... is that sentimental? I think they are an expression of remorse and shame, not sure that is sentiment.. Micheals photo is wonderful and the fact that they are his grandparents is irrelevant to it's wonder...it may be sentimental to him but not to me but still equally as wondrous ... What if they had a terrible relationship where is the truth there?

It would be good if michael would respond to that, if he knows anything of the relationship. But as I said before, the viewer with no knowledge of the event puts their own sentiments/or not, onto the work, IMO. I think remorse and shame can be combined with sentiment, at funerals for example.
The dying sunflowers, make me feel remorseful because there,s no saving them, you can,t resuscitate a flower once it's gone past it's full flowering stage, but there,s sentiment. When we realise, it may flower again next year, not sure about sunflowers. We can look at the event in a lighter sense it has lived its expected life, saying that it doesn't,t stop us reflecting on the death, loss, sickness, our own mortality and the transience of life itself, oh and the destruction by man of the natural flora and fauna. That painting speaks volumes......if you have some amount of sentimentality, maybe?

Rumination or lamentation are they equivalent to sentimental......not sure....but these discussions don,t prove one way or the other what really is sentimental.....it is only sentimental to the extreme which reveals that a person is basically a sentimental fool, focussing on the shallow, pretty, no consequence to life from an experienced adult, as children can be excused, but I think we are all so much more aware of saying ahhh! When we look at something, like my puppy,s face when I am speaking to her and her fluffy face moves from side to side !

And this?

sorry double post!

Thanks Philip!!!

The sounds are an intentional random minute recording with a mic outside my studio. The silence is of course beneath it :-)

We can look at the event in a lighter sense it has lived its expected life, saying that it doesn't,t stop us reflecting on the death, loss, sickness, our own mortality and the transience of life itself, oh and the destruction by man of the natural flora and fauna. That painting speaks volumes..

thank you for this Maria but this is not sentimental but acceptance of the way things are....dead....

Philip and Xo i can't seem to watch any videos on my lap top , I'm on the road and need to download an update.., so I can't comment on them....

I can sit in my 200 year old house deep up in the mountains that has no electricity and hear a candle hum or a buzz through the silence.. The snow falling with a hiss sounds like fine sweetness.. I've never heard sounds like this any where else..

I think most of us would agree that there are some beautiful visuals in this discussion.....including some sentimental ones. The sound of snow...the hum of a candle...living in a 200 yr old cottage in the mountains.....how does this feel to you robert...just acceptance, peace, freedom, beauty, solace, romantic, isn't,t there a hint of sentimentality there somewhere.
In the sunflower image and rhetoric that followed, you felt acceptance I felt thatoo, but also more. Maybe I unable to be single minded.....just occurred to me now!
Sounds die too...but while they are reaching ur ears you describe them with a depth of feeling/thought/maybe even sentiment.....don,t give up do I? Haha
Thanks guys for those images while I was experiencing them I forgot about the pain in my arm!
For some reason I can,t see the images on theipad will try on laptop later.
My friend whose sister lives on a farm in the sticks told me that sitting outside in the peacefulness she could hear a snail moving across a leaf. I so wanted to hear that. I do recall many times in England hearing the fresh fall of snow pfft to the ground, already cushioned in the white stuff. I must send you all the Christmas chapter. Now that is full of sentiment,nostalgia,reality,fun,innocence,etc,etc

Philip,
About snow motion.....I,m speechless!
At first I thought too noisy but then remembered oxo talking about the sound of the snow being beneath all other sounds, which I realised was man's noise not nature's....it was beautiful. The sound of the storm wind heightened the drama, and the way that the visuals evolved...very creative and sensitive. I don't think I felt much sentimentality, although I know it always lurks there, just the remembrance of snow is jam packed with sentiment FOR ME...

I've just managed to see the wind scene, OMG, the force of nature, almost voicing it's own existence on camera, I love how the man responded to that sudden rouse of nature. :))

I have just become a tarkovsky fan and will not rest until I have seen his film collection, then read his poetry....thank you philip!:))) apparently with his film collection is a documentary discussing in part.....sentimentality!!