Entire echelons of the elite coalesce around their opposition to certain notions of shallowness, and these resonant notions of shallowness, in turn, find resonant names in the realms of the literary and the oral. Our gut reacts towards and against. We cast around for a vocabulary to contain excess, to name and accuse and banish it: too much sentiment, unmediated by nuance; too much sweet, undisciplined by restraint. We are greedy for unmitigated and uncomplicated sensation, but we hate ourselves for this greed.

In my turn, I’m full of anger at this hatred. We dispatch entire works, entire genres in the clean guillotine strokes of these words: saccharine, syrupy, sentimental. It’s as if sentimentality is something we don’t need to define. We only need to hate it, shield ourselves from it, articulate ourselves against it—thus asserting that we are arbiters of artistry and subtlety, an elite so sensitive we don’t need the same forceful quantities of feeling. We will subsist more delicately, we say. We will subsist on less.