I was shocked, both because I had always seen Milosz as possessed of a clear-eyed recognition of human imperfection that was the very opposite of sentimentality, and because, having just proclaimed my love of his work, I felt personally impugned, not just for my taste, but for my character and vision of the world. Perhaps she never told me.
One way or another that thread of our conversation got lost. But I have thought about her assertion ever since and I have had numerous extended debates with her in my imagination, all of which end with my uttering one or another pronouncement that would seem to settle our argument forever — except, of course, it never does.
At odd moments — during a walk, or at some sleepless hour of the early morning — her assertion will come back to me across more than a decade, and we will start arguing all over again. But when it was finished, people all around me were wiping away tears, and I was in a state of perplexity. The poem could hardly have been less skillful, but that is not at all to say that the feelings it expressed and evoked were unjustified, or shameful. Even if the sentimentality of supposedly feminine feelings is held to be only a matter of degree, what authority on earth can tell us how much we should love our children?
Does it even make sense to confine love within certain limits, regardless of who sets them? Is it possible? Or is the whole notion merely simplistic fantasy? There is no question that sentimentality is an important concept, keeping us on guard against falseness of character, simple-mindedness and injustices perpetrated in the guise of laudable emotion.
On the contrary, they seem to find it invigorating. I myself find it invigorating. Why is this? Why is it so easy for us to invest passion in a term we can just barely define? And, for better or worse, the human species has never had difficulty investing emotion in ideals.
