In my last post, "Children's Books About Love," several readers mentioned books that make them choke up when they're reading them aloud. Isn't that the worst? I don't know who suffers more, the teary parent, or the kids writhing in embarrassment: "Ma-ma, it's just a rabbit!"
I've been thinking lately about the things that get to us, and why. Like many people, I get indignant when I come across a book or piece of art that's specifically designed to elicit tears. I resent being manipulated -- all the more so when it works too well. They press the button; I cry. Argh.
There is a difference, though, between manipulating emotions and evoking them -- between demanding tears and eliciting them.
I stumbled across these words by Laurence Perrine from his book Sound and Sense:
Sentimentality is indulgence in emotion of its own sake, or expression of more emotion than an occasion warrants ... Sentimental literature is 'tear-jerking' literature. It aims primarily at stimulating the emotions directly rather than at communicating experience truly and freshly; it depends on trite and well-tried formulas for exciting emotion; it revels in old oaken buckets, rocking chairs, mother love, and the pitter-patter of little feet; it oversimplifies; it is unfaithful to the full complexity of human experience.
In other words, sentimentality is the younger sister of pornography (a connection made by Flannery O'Connor, among many others). There is the same inappropriate separation from "the full complexity if human experience," and the same disastrously deadening effect, over time, for the consumer: after a while, you prefer this short cut, this parody, to the real thing. It's easy and fast, and doesn't demand anything from you -- it just gets the job done.
There's no moral problem with indulging in sentimentality, as there is in indulging in pornography. But there is a danger in it. Part of informing your emotional faculties is using some self-discipline, and not allowing yourself to wallow in sentimentality -- because it is addictive, and it is cheap. We should make an effort to learn to distinguish between what is sentimental and what is appropriately emotionally evocative. When a book or a movie makes us cry, we should think about why.
We often have an uneasy disgust for certain works, even as we can't help feeling the feeling we're supposed to feel: we know, deep down, that these things are not supposed to come out of no where. When I was in second grade, my teacher read aloud The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. When she got to the part where the tree died, I laughed. I didn't even know why -- it certainly wasn't funny! I just remember feeling angry and uneasy, and what came out was loud laughter. The teacher furiously said, "It's not funny!" at which point I began to cry. I loved my teacher desperately, and was always crying when no one else was -- and now I was laughing when everyone else was crying. Argh, argh.
So that's why I don't like The Giving Tree. It doesn't have room for anything other than one single response, and if you don't follow through, you are left feeling like there's something wrong with you. It's a business transaction, and if you don't hold up your end (by weeping, or at least sighing heavily), you feel stupid, like a guy who hires a hooker and then just wants to chat.
What's the difference, then, between a tear-jerker and a work that effectively and reliably elicits tears? Several readers brought up Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant," which I agree is both a wonderful story about love, and very painful to read. Try to read Ivan's description of unanswerable evil in The Brothers Karamazov without ice in your heart. And it doesn't have to be great literature: scenes from certain movies that get me every time: the "Chava" sequence from Fiddler on the Roof; the scene from The Iron Giant where the Giant murmurs "Superman . . . " to himself as he blasts up into the heavens; and even "Baby Mine" from Dumbo. (And yes, it's a little grotesque to string together these tragic clips one after another without context!)
So what's the difference between these (which, I assert, are genuinely tragic and moving, without crossing that dangerous line) and the merely sentimental?
One thing that separates the obscenely sentimental from the genuinely sad is that, when we walk away from a sentimental work, we feel a tiny sense of self-satisfaction: Whee-oo, I did real good with my sadness there! I responded the right way! Whereas a really tragic work leaves us with a little dark spot of sadness that won't be washed away by coming to the last page: we feel, perhaps, like there is some unfinished business. We feel that something is demanded of us in our actual lives, as if we could alleviate some of the suffering of the fictional characters we just witnessed -- or else we are just suddenly more aware of the general sadness, the fallenness of things. We are reminded that, for a long while yet, there are things we cannot change.
So when a book or movie or song makes us cry, we might stop and try to figure out why. Was it just a quickie? Or was it an encounter that latched onto something real?
Of course, when we're dealing with human emotions, there's always a vast middleground of mystery -- things that move us against our will because of who we are, what we've been through, what fears and weaknesses and half-forgotten childhood associations we have, or even which hormones are currently flooding our poor brains. For instance, when I was quite young and pregnant with my second baby, I was reading Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales to my first baby. I got the part where the Old Mouse's pants have fallen down, and he goes to his wife for help. But she just gives him a hit on the head with a rolling pin and says what are surely the cruellest words uttered in the history of mousekind: "You look silly in your underwear."
Yeah, I cried. I mean . . .THAT POOR MOUSE!
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Yay, “Sound and Sense”! That was our highschool poetry textbook, and it’s so good. I especially love the chapters “Good Poetry and Bad” and “Good Poetry and Great.” Did you know, by the way, that the newest edition is still good, and even has some good additions, like an excellent chapter about how to write about poetry? Great article, too; I like the litmus test you propose.
I agree with you on The Giving Tree (and my husband thinks I’m a total jerk for feeling that way. Aha! Vindicated!), but disagree on the Iron Giant. There were good moments, but as a whole the movie was a stinker. “Guns kill people. You’re not a gun”: guns=bad, military generals=easily manipulated yelling jerk idiots, beatnicks=awesome. I just found the whole thing so lame.
I thought I was the only one who reacted badly to The Giving Tree!! And yes, I’ve always felt guilty about it. Thank you relieving me of my guilt… :)
I had really mixed feelings about it! So much irritating, but so much exciting and unusual. I wouldn’t hold it against someone who just couldn’t tolerate it because of the annoying parts. I also (I know this makes me really crazy) have a soft spot in my heart for Ted Hughes because I dislike Sylvia Plath so much. Ted Hughes wrote the book that the movie is based on, but I haven’t read the book. So there’s that.
Perrine! We used his Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense in a life-changing HS lit class and your mention of his name triggered an almost Proustian Memory. (I say “almost” because it prompted a couple paragraphs in a combox, not 4,000 pages of fiction.) Our teacher would refer to the book as “Perrine,” as in “on page 76 of Perrine,” but we referred to it as “Larry” because we were sixteen and ironic.
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That was an interesting linkage of sentimentality and pornography. I’ve never read that before but it makes a lot of sense.
When I was 17, I printed out this quote (including the part you omitted) and posted it in my locker. Years later, I could barely hold it together while reading The Velveteen Rabbit to my oldest child.
What I liked about Iron Giant was the message, “You are who you choose to be,” We try to teach our kids that we are the sum of the choices we make in life. Every day we wake up and we need to choose, “Am I going to do good today, or bad?” Even the worst person can change, by making choices. Just because the Iron Giant was created to be a weapon did not make that his destiny. He could choose.
My daughter & I laughed through much of the film “The Notebook.” And we weren’t the only ones.
I just forwarded this article to my daughter. We were talking yesterday about the difference between bands like Mumford and Sons and Christian music, and the difference (or essential lack of difference) between Christian music and bubble-gum pop songs, and why so many of her friends are drawn to the stuff that is not challenging. I really do think wallowing too much in sentimentality can deaden you to the real thing.
I am pushing 70 and “Baby Mine” still touches me. The context is so poignant. A mother tries to protect her baby and is punished for it. In today’s “meme” world, that concept is even more real and tragic. I once read “The Story of the Other Wiseman” for a radio program. It was live and I had to keep shutting off the microphone and swallowing hard in the final chapter so I could finish it without blubbering over the ectoplasm. Thanks for a great and thoughtful article.
I’m surprised that no one brought up the first ten minutes of ‘Up’. Even when I know it’s coming, I choke up.
But what chokes me up most reliably are scenes where the character becomes heroic, pushing beyond theirselves, sacrificing for something they believe in. The final race scene in ‘The Black Stallion’, where Alec and the Black transcend the trappings of a horse race, touching what’s pure/true about their relationship and their nature. Or the sacrifice in a movie like ‘Saving Private Ryan’.
it is true that sentimental movies manipulate moral and individual principles
The book Love You Forever gets me every time. I’m not sure why I keep it on the kids’ shelf, since I can’t read it without crying. The Little engine that could also mysteriously gets me. I haven’t even read Velveteen Rabbit to my kids because I know I won’t be able to do it. And The beginning of Up and end of Juno get me also.
I haven’t thought of sentimental/manipulative movies/books in line with pornography—it’s a very apt comparison. Thank you. That also explains why I felt dirty after watching the movie “Beaches” when my best friend from high school asked me to see it with her. (Lookee! Lady with cancer! Jerky friend who finally creaks toward maturity . . . but her friend must DIE to accomplish that! Kind of like The Giving Tree!) Now I need to go bleach my brain.
I hate that book, Love You Forever. It’s so creepy when the mom climbs the window of her adult son’s home and into his bedroom and sits there holding him on the edge of his bed. So many people love this book, and when I see that illustration, I am always going back and forth between amusement at the ridiculousness of it all, and horror at picturing it happen to me.
“Honey, did you hear that?” “Hear what?” “THAT! I think there’s someone at the window!” “Oh, that. That’s just my mom. Sometimes she climbs in my window at night and sits on the bed and rocks me. Is that going to be a problem?”
When I was a kid I cried when reading “The Courage of Sarah Noble.” Years later, browsing the homeschool conference vendors, I found the book and stood in the middle of the conference crying. I am NOT a sentimental kind of mom. But I had to expose my kids to that book. Haven’t met another person who cried with reading it. Why did that story move me? I don’t think Dalgliesh wrote sentimentally. The last chapter of Rawls “Summer of the Monkeys” had me uncontrollably sobbing. MAybe he was a little manipulative but I did not shed A tear, I soaked a bath towel. Not a book but a poem: Love that Dog by Sharon Creech. Watch out if you have pets.
Thank you for this, Simcha. I now have a conceptual
framework to explain why I don’t like
Mitch Albom’s work in general, and why I was
so ambivalent about Garth Stein’s “The Art of Racing
in the Rain”.
I’ve always liked The Giving Tree, mostly because it makes me think of Christ and how He gave and gave and gave, even to the point of dying on a tree, and how we so rarely remember in our day-to-day lives just how much those sacrifices get us through each moment. But I can see your point as well. :)
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In many ways, I am the sucker for sentimentality. I cry all the time in books, whether it’s little kid books, children’s novels, young adult literature, or adult literature—I’m pretty much a sap. I cry at the sad parts, the happy parts, the heroic parts. In “Where the Red Fern Grows”, I cry in about 10 different places: when he makes the necessary money to buy the dogs, when his little pups prove so courageous when they hear the mountain lion in the cave, when they catch their first coon, when Billy is chopping down the big tree, when Little Anne wins the cup for best in show, when all of them win the big championship, when they save Billy from the bobcat, when Old Dan dies, when Little Anne won’t eat, when she dies, when Billy finds the red fern—the whole book is pretty much a sopping mess for me from start to finish! :) .
In spite of this weakness for sentimentality, I like to think that I also possess a pretty good ability to take what was good and throw out the bad. I’ve read books like the “Wheel of Time” series by Robert Jordan or the Twilight series and known that they were pretty crappy in terms of literature, yet was able to appreciate the parts of them that were new and original or creative. Does this redeem me?!? :P
One of the annoyances of the Olympics, here in England, was that the BBC interviewers did their utmost to make every athlete they interviewed, cry. It was sick.
(Perhaps I should clarify that worthy evocations of my emotions also get to me; I don’t really discriminate! :P )
This book is an amazing book fr children and always makes me cry: A Tale of three trees:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tale-Three-Trees-Traditional/dp/0745917437
Three trees are chopped down and image they will be crafted into amazing works of wood. The first tree wants to be a beautiful treasure box, but is made into a lowly feed box (the manger). Tthe second wants to be a great strong ship for a king and instead is made into a lowly fishing boat (the boat Christ is in when He calms the sea). The last wants to be the tallest tree in the world. It is chopped and tossed aside, eventually used for Christ’s cross. The last lines of the book are these:
“But on Sunday morning, when the sun rose and the earth trembled with joy beneath her, the third tree knew that God’s love changed everything.
It made the first tree beautiful.
It made the second tree strong.
And every time people thought of the third tree, they would think of God.
That was better tan being the tallest tree in the world.”
I got roped into reading Jodi Piccoult’s “My Sister’s Keeper” and ended up furious at the manipulative ending. Never again, Ms. Piccoult! At your recommendation, I read the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, and cried (hard) at the part where she retrieves the dead body of the peasant woman and is told that her reward will be waiting when Christ tells her that it was his body that she rescued. Just thinking about it gets to me. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few movie moments that have evoked genuine emotion:
1. The scene in “Almost Famous” when Frances McDormand tells Billy Crudup’s Russell Hammond character that there’s hope for him yet.
2. The scene in “The King’s Speech” when the speech is broadcast to the silent horror of listeners who haven’t recovered from the last war.
3. The scene in the wonderful “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” when Frances McDormand tells Amy Adams that there will be a war and that she must not waste one moment of her life. Actually, there are so many great moments in that movie…Ciaran Hinds’ and Frances McDormand’s scene on the terrace is also wonderful (“they don’t remember the last one”).
Great post!
“Was it just a quickie?” LOL!
Sometimes our senses betray us. It’s like eating fast food when we are starving.
You write a great blog. This one shares great insight. Kudos! : )
The book that gets me most is The Runaway Bunny. I tear up just thinking about it! I actually used to cry at that book as a child too, when my mom would read it. And then pretended to hate that book because I didn’t want to cry. Very thoughtful post!
“Little Boy Blue” by Eugene Field
I qit reading The Littlest Angel decades ago.
“Love You Forever” is very uneven—yes, even really weird. And mawkish.
But when the son stands at the top of the stairs after his mother’s funeral for a long time—that was subtle, brilliant and genuinely moving. That’s the scene that hits me the hardest.
I cried at the end of 3 adult books: Kristen Lavransdatter, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Cure of Ars Today (Fr. George Rutler’s biography of St. John Vianney—-wonderful, wonderful!!)
Each Christmas, I can’t read the Little Matchstick Girl out loud to the kids without crying, and we’ve made our way through Summer of the Monkeys twice, not escaping a huge crying jag on my part. I bawled and couldn’t read during a portion of Amos Fortune, Free Man, either.
I have mixed feelings about Love You, Forever. I think it is totally contrived and manipulative; however, I must say the general theme of the book is what saves it. Unfortunately my mom read it at my home years ago and she now buys it for every new mother in our family. She’s a Baby Boomer, so I’ll blame that for her lack of discretion ;-)
Nicely done, Simcha
I always cry when I watch the series finale of MASH and have since I was a kid. And when I read the very end of “All the Weyrs of Pern” by Anne McCaffrey, I choke up even though I’ve read the book like 50 times.
I find, though, that since I’ve had kids I choke up at little things that wouldn’t have affected me before…like watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade with my kids.
I remember, though, seeing “Hope Floats” in the theater. I was having a really bad summer and I think I was slightly hormonal and that movie had the most contrived and depressing ending. I ended up sobbing uncontrollably for 30 minutes after the movie ended much to the bewilderment of the guy friend I was hanging out with. I still think of that movie as “Hope SINKS”.
Sentimental - read sad - is a range of emotions everyone is (sadly)familiar with. There’s enough of it going around.
You do better to completely avoid The Truly Tragic, since real tragedy is only discernable to those who are in it themselves.
The prince (or princess) of emotive reading is The Comic, which is the hardest to produce. Sentimentality is like accumulated cobwebs which need to be cleaned out from time to time with a blast of cool, fresh air. The deepest things elicit deep laughter, require it in fact.
The greatest American writer is Twain.
I cry like a baby all the time when I pray, or read, or watch TV. I think some people just normally have overflowing tear ducts. I cried when my brothers were spanked, I cry when I sense pain in someone. My brothers and husband laugh at me because it doesn’t take much to get me going….
This explains why I love the movie The English Patient so much too…not so much the romance that goes on between Juliette Binoche and her Indian friend, nor the explicit romance between Ralph Fiennes and—argh, forgetting her name, the married woman and oh yeah, the blatant promotion of euthanasia—but just the movie in general. The trials of life that it so exquisitely captures: ache, betrayal, pain and death-in-life. So, a lot to hate in that movie but much to admire as well.
Perhaps that’s also why I tend to shy away from Christian movies too? Imagine making the pornography/sentimentality comparison to the people who made Fireproof.
Another good post. I love it when you write about books!
An example of a movie that is genuinely grief-inspiring, and not just sentimental, is Grave of the Fireflies. It definitely left a spot of sadness in my heart. It is about something that is traditionally sentimentalized (suffering children) but it is not sentimental. One leaves it with horror at the thought of such agony. It is a plain telling of a terrible (not in the bad sense!) story, IIRC. (I had stomach flu when I watched it. Bad, bad move.)
This is a review I liked: decentfilms.com/reviews/graveofthefireflies
For me, true beauty arouses such a deep longing that it’s almost physically painful - a longing which can’t be satisfied this side of heaven. Come, Lord Jesus!
Usually these stabs of the heart or “moments made eternity” as CS Lewis referred to them are unsought and come randomly - when rocking my children when they were babies, when near the ocean, mountains, etc. These are often sublime and filled with a peaceful, quite yearning.
Other things bring a “stab” with them and invariably turn on the tears:
The intermezzo from the Cavalleria Rusticana
Sullivan Ballou’s last letter to his wife
Out of Africa - the parting scene with Farah “you must make this fire very big”
Matt 15:21-28 - “Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” For the life of me, I don’t know why this scripture always gets me - but her response (above) always makes me cry.
~ At least our pain and yearning - with God’s grace and mercy - will be satisfied in eternity.
I wonder if that is the pain of the damned: they despise the one thing that can bring them peace - instead they suffer eternal loss and are never to be satisfied.
For those of you who mentioned Kristin Lavransdatter - I’ve read more than one translation and it makes a world of difference. If you haven’t read the excellent translation by Tiina Nunnally, please do, you’re in for a treat!
Lastly, thank you, folks, for mentioning feeling manipulated - I have several critical things I’d like to say to Peter Jackson about his LOTR trilogy - one of which was his overuse of tears. I can’t watch the Return of the King without being irritated by Frodo and Sam’s blubbing at the drop of a hat.
You are speaking to me today, Simcha! I’ve always been uncomfortable with and wary of the manipulative sentimentality that so many books and movies have. I don’t respond the way everyone else I know does, and it leaves me feeling awfully cold, kind of like Mr. Spock on Star Trek. It’s a huge reason why, when my mom became a born again, spirit-filled, speaking-in-tongues weepy pentecostal, I ran the other way as fast as I could. I always felt like I was being manipulated, and my response was wonky. After reading this and everyone’s comments, I feel slightly more…normal (although it’s all relative). Thank you!
You finally explained to me why I like reading your blog so much. (Why can’t I just be as good as sliced bread and like housewifey blogs that teach me how to bake a casserole?)... or why I love to hate the endings of French movies, but despise myself far more, when I’m duped enough to like perfectly orchestrated Hollywood endings, that leave a bubblegum taste in the mouth.
horribly, i can’t read or watch the end of the winnie the pooh without bawling like a baby. it gets me everytime. “promise you’ll never forget me, not even when i’m 100?” is not quite as bad as, “a little bear will always be waiting.” in fact, i’m crying now, just thinking about it!
“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness” ~ Flannery O’Connor.
For years and years, in my life, I didn’t cry. I didn’t shed a tear when my dad was dying of cancer. Then, I became a crybaby. I would think of just about anything and start crying, often at Mass or at work. Maybe, I secretly wanted to get kicked out of the Church and fired.—so someone would take care of me. There may not have been someone there to take care of me. I am trying to find the middle road.
I get sucked into almost any bid for tears on the screen. At one point I started making a list of movies that had made me cry, and switched to one of movies that hadn’t made me cry.
Most of those movies I don’t even remember now, but there are a few of the kind you mentioned, that I can’t forget. When my husband and I were newlyweds, before he knew the extent of my tendency for tears, he showed me a Japanese movie called Casshern. It started out confusing and somewhat macabre, and ended by quietly breaking my heart, and making my bewildered husband think he had done something terrible to cause me such sorrow.
Kay, The Littlest Angle is the only children’s book that has ever made me cry. Maybe it’s because when I bought it and read it to my son he was exactly the age of the Littlest Angel and even looked like him (in the original illustrated version from the 1960’s). I tried to read it several times to my son but could never get through it without completely breaking down. My son got freaked out with me crying. I finally gave it away. Then when my next son got to that age I thought I must have been crazy to get rid such a classic so I ordered another one. Same thing happened. I gave it away again. ARGH!
Well, from the Bible it’s got to be when Mary Magdalene is in the garden, hysterical because she thinks that Christ’s body has been stolen. And Jesus just says, “Mary.”
Sometimes less is more.
And Up. Definitely Up- just the first 10 minutes. I keep trying to get my brother to watch it, but he refuses because he knows it will, in his words, “destroy” him.
Oh…I thought I was the only one with a heart of stone. I have never liked The Giving Tree. There are movies I can only watch once, and books too…because I come away mad that I was moved beyond what was legitimate, forced to feel something that should not have been forced.
Thanks for the brief run through of the why of things and the why of good art, it evokes without clubbing us over the head.
I clicked the links.
I might mention that in my youth as a class project I read “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte. To this day I’m not sure if I should have been allowed to read such a “dark and brooding” classic at a still tender age.
The book, “Tuesdays with Morrie” followed the same smooth track as “Giving Tree”: one acceptable way to respond (non-religious softening?); somberness in the face of nothing that couldn’t already be found in the lives of the saints.
People want the Catholic Church, deep down.
I’ve been known to bawl at the aerly Cotton: The Fabric of Our Lives commercials, but ordinarily sentimental stuff leaves me cold. Except for stories about our troops. They get me every time.
http://youtu.be/upd9AtdeAoE
As I grow older, I find that I cry more easily at things that are simply beautiful, not sad or tragic.
That, and the Christian the Lion videos on YouTube…
I don’t cry much, but I could NOT read “Dumbo” to my kids without crying. I hate those made-from-a-movie-books and my daughter ALWAYS brings them home from library day. Anyways….Dumbo killed me. My daughter is Deaf, and wears cochlear implants, and I just couldn’t help seeing her as Dumbo…being teased for her different “ears”....how I have had to send her away from me for full-day school programs from a young age to get the therapy she needs (and I am thankful thankful and wouldn’t change that, but it is still hard) like Dumbo is separated from his mother….ugh. I am getting a leeeetle emotional thinking about it lol.
When you described the difference between sentimentality and true tragedy, you made me think of “The Lorax.” There’s something that people can do something about, right at the end. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
I’m glad I’m not the only one that cries at Winnie the Pooh, except for me it’s the passage about Galleon’s Lap at the end of The House at Pooh Corner.
The Velveteen Rabbit—Oh, yes. I cry, every. single. time. Even just thinking about it.
Also The Christmas Miracle of Johnathan Toomey, and The Mouse and His Child. And the last bit of Rabbit Hill. And pretty much anything to do with Aslan in Narnia, especially the whole Stone Table part, both the sadness and the glory of it.
My oldest daughter hated the The Giving Tree and now I think it was because she was always the type to resent having her emotions manipulated. If you told her to thank someone, she wouldn’t do it - not because she wasn’t grateful, but because she wanted to do it on her own without it seeming forced. I actually learned a lot from my eldest.
//
Oh, and something that makes me cry every time I hear it is this version of the Halleluja Chorus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76RrdwElnTU&feature=player_embedded
I can’t watch it with anyone else in the room, it embarrasses me to death. But the lady smiling at 2:38 and the tenors hitting that note at the very end… maybe it’s a bit sentimental, but I can’t help it. I’m as bad as my mother who cries every time Maria gets married in the Sound of Music.
I wonder how this attraction to sentimentality and tear-jerkers in particular vary across different cultures and life-situations. I doubt that someone in the grips of deep suffering and struggle is going to feel the same level of attraction as someone whose life is overwhelmingly comfortable. I sometimes feel that our society in particular has a paralyzing fear of suffering - but then we have this draw to the tear-jerker. Like we recognize at some level that suffering is transformative, but we want the safe controlled fictional version.
Anyway, my favorite crying moment which no-one has mentioned is the end of The Incredible Journey, when the little boy tells his dad he never expected Bodger to make it home and then Bodger comes running down the hill. Oh I am crying right now.
In the movie “Bambi”, when Bambi’s mother is shot by a hunter; I can’t avoid tearing up. But then again, hearing certain music (by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov or David Haas) seems to have an emotional connection.
The fact that some items seem to cause tears does not prevent me from contributing to Catholic Relief Services, Maryknoll and our Diocesan appeal according to our means. Enjoying sentimentality (?) does not prevent us from taking Matt 25:31-46 and Luke 16: 19-31 seriously.
TeaPot562
I’ve been trying to explain to some people in our book club why we just won’t discuss certain books. I think I make them angry. This article should help. Now they will hate you instead of me and you don’t know them, so that will be better. ;-)
I cried at mass today, first because my son was irritating me yet again during mass, but that’s another story. Then I cried thinking about my daughter leaving for college. Later today I cried at the nursing home watching a woman in a wheelchair cuddling a teddy bear like a baby. I cry at weddings, baptisms and other life moments. I distinctly remember reading Nana Upstairs, Nana Downstairs by Tommie DePaola for the first time to the kids and barely being able to continue. Sometimes I think, gosh, what is wrong with me?
@Rebecca, who said, “I doubt that someone in the grips of deep suffering and struggle is going to feel the same level of attraction as someone whose life is overwhelmingly comfortable.”
I have been in the grips of deep suffering and struggle a number of times in my life, and what I found in those times was that the sentimental/emotionally manipulative things often made me angry because I felt as if others were pretending to feel what I felt, when I knew they weren’t, and that they never had, and probably never would. Occasionally the sentimental things would make me respond in the way they were intended, but afterwards I always felt a sort of sick emptiness, like eating junk food on an empty stomach. Whereas I have always felt immense relief in the stark realism of Psalm 22’s, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” the Lamentations of Jeremiah (“All who see me mock at me”), and Ps. 42’s query, “Why art thou cast down, my soul? Hope in God; I will praise him still, my savior and my God.”
So true.
I don’t know what TV you’re watching, but as I read these nice comments I’m viewing a popup for some starving child in a developing nation. The saccharine tag line is that his mother doesn’t want him to die from malnutrition. You pass by appeals like this every day, twice a day. But I happen to know that this mother’s anguish is real and justified, unlike a lot of the bourgeois angst shed over Cavalleria Rusticana and Lamentations. There are too many real things in the world that need a well-justified tear, along with an actual response, to be carried away by a velveteen rabbit. You will know real tragedy when it hits you.
Matt B ,
Bourgeois angst?
I’m more and more astonished at how many Catholics have been granted the gift of reading hearts! Padre Pio could know what was on a person’s conscience if they were in the confessional with him; but Matt B can tell whether anyone cares about starving children just by being in the same combox with them. Amazing!
It’s a gift. It comes with being a fully initiated member of the Church Petulant.
@Matt B: HA. I love it. I can only pray that, in my lifetime, we will see your Church reunited with mine. (I’m a prominent member of the Church Berzerk.)
Kathleen, did you know that (during the time of) Lamentations, mothers would bargain with eachother over whose infant to eat first? I can hear the strains of Rossini as corpulent italians douse eachother with elegant euphemisms as the stage lights up.
If you take out deuteroIsaiah, all the OT prophets are similarly “gloomy.” Compare the list of occurences for the word “sword” with the list for “love” in your concordance. And those scriptural swords are not weilded ineffectually, or in vain.
But lest you consider that this is all “bronze age barbarism,” and forgotten verbal flourishes, you ought to know that the very “people of God” to whom these things were addressed (and who unfortunately proved them out) were identically complacent and “bourgeois.”
The Bridge to Terebithia. I admit, I read it as I was coming out of a yearlong depression, exacerbated by loneliness, at the age of 17. I had no friends and had loved reading the story of friendship. And then when .... the sad part happened .... I sobbed and sobbed. I do.not.cry at books. Ever. Or movies. Except that one! Also, yes, the Fiddler on the Roof, the scene you mentioned.
I found myself sniffling at the end of Titantic, though, and hated myself for it. That is NOT real emotion. They just play sad music to make you feel like you’re sad Leonardo diCaprio dies, but in reality, I was actually glad to see him go because he was a piece of work in that movie.
Posted by Matt B on Thursday, Aug 16, 2012 3:22 PM (EST):Kathleen, did you know that (during the time of) Lamentations, mothers would bargain with eachother over whose infant to eat first? ‘
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Beg pardon, are you talking about Jews cannabalizing children? That’s pretty offensive.Or did you mean something else?
Kathleen:
See 2 Kings 6, 24-31. Alternate references are peppered throughout the OT. Notice here how the apostate king blames the prophet, and not his own sick and sorry self.
MattB,
Josephus mentions an instance of this during the Roman seige as well but Jewish mothers during the time written about in Lamentations did not take turns eating each other’s children as general practise.I don’t think you meant to infer that either, but your post might could read that way.
Jews during the Holocaust went to extraordinary lengths to protect their children, born & unborn, even in the midst of seemingly hopeless situations.If that happened in the concentration camps & ghettos, I believe the vast majority of Jewish women did likewise during Old Testament seiges & famines.
I guess that’s what’s meant by “making your sons and daughters pass through the fire.” To be specific, the people of God, obviously tainted by idolotry, adopted the pagan practice of sacrificing their children to Moloch by immolation. This was not an isolated occurence, but endemic to Hebrew apostacy.
My point is not to criticize the Jewish people, but to highlight their historical behavior which points to our own actions and attitudes today. After all, they too were “the People of God.”
Although the People of God, they were not immune to God’s wrath. We in America have considered ourselves especially privileged to be a people uniquely God’s own. But God disciplines his own, as my scripture passage demonstrates.
Somehow the ancient kingdom of Israel “fell asleep” into spiritual complacency and outright apostacy (and disappeared historically from the face of the earth).
It’s really not so hard to imagine.
Matt B,
I believe our nation has much to worry about & complacency is dangerous to any culture.
I understand your point wasn’t to criticize the Jewish people, but my point is that the tenets of their faith & tradition is to honor life at all stages, even at great personal risk & against all odds. The instances where Jews did not do this stand out all the more starkly because it is so opposed to the norm.
Kathleen, I would go so far as to say that compassion is a universal human trait. To see people enthralled in depravity is a testimony to oppression, and not a picture of their inner nature. There’s a lot of that theme as Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt.
In fact, the OT people of God are a study in contrasts. On the same page you find both Elijah and Ahab. Within the same OT saint, you find exalted heights of praise, adultery and murder. Seems like a study of every tortuous heart God ever created.
More to your point, I generally distinguish between scriptural identity, and ethnic identity. Ethnic groups are more or less the same wherever you go: they love their families, prefer peace and laughter, like to work (up to a point). There are both sheep and goats among them, and even a few wolves.
When you talk about “The People of God,” however, you need to include everyone who’s been tranformed by the love of God into his own son or daughter. And in God’s family, there are no ethnic groups. In his family, we share in the divine patrimony of scripture: our names are found in the book of life. BTW: none of this has anything to do with accidents of birth.
I’m not sure what the norm is on eating children, but the lesson I’m taking away is that it could easily be me. It has been me.
“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?” -SOren Kierkegaard
Anyway, I immediately remembered how we used to think it HILARIOUS to make my mother read “The Little Matchstick Girl” by HC Anderson to us as children because she would always cry.
I felt manipulated by the Runaway Bunny until I saw Emma Thompson in Wit. I guess I needed to have it spelled out. I still hate Giving Tree—it seems to let the users off easy.
After I came back to church I cried every Sunday for a year. Not misting, but snot-on-your-lip weeping for everyone to see. Humiliating, but I deserved it. God chastens those whom he loves, in my case.
I do think the kids are right to think I am a little bit ridiculous.
I completely agree with this distinction and I always find this discussion very interesting. One thing I do dislike, however, is that in acknowledging and trying to work out this issue people so often render judgment on each other if someone really has been touched by something cheap and sentimental. Wallowing in sentimentality is dangerous, but you can’t tell if someone is in actual danger just because they really did feel a hole in their stomach when they first heard The Giving Tree. This is especially true because our individual lives can give very… unique context to the stories we hear. So being a sentimentality addict is something demonstrated over one’s reactions to many works, not just one’s reaction to [insert your favorite litmus test story here].
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