My two-year-old daughter Eve says she loves me.
Really, Eve sings, “I la-la Mommy. I la-la Mommy.” For her, love is a song. Is it taking the metaphor too far to follow with something embarrassingly predictable like, “And my heart sings”?
One day, Eve will probably shrink at my sentimentality here. Because I do, too, it’s easy to forgive her upcoming adolescent eye rolling.
But Eve’s song is beautiful. I wonder why sentimentality is perpetually passé, the stuff of so-called low art? A sometimes academic and always a bibliophile, I understand the literary reaction to 18th c. sentimental novels. But that backlash happened two hundred years ago. We’ve since read a lot of realism. So why is sentimentality still considered a simplicity for the masses? Continue reading
love and biscuits 