Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, in which he proposes a thought experiment involving aliens interacting with humans from which the above comes: an alien’s description of human consciousness.
I adore Lost in the Cosmos, but what struck me about this passage was that it echoes something Hemingway wrote in a Nick Adams short story called “Fathers and Sons,” which I posted some time ago:
“…he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused.”
This consensus association of sentimentality and cruelty is precisely the sort of insight for which one must rely on literature, and it reminds me of many in my life, and indeed of myself, and I wonder: why should this be so? What determines this connection? Of what coin are sentimentality and cruelty the two sides? Excessive regard for the feelings of the self? Is it that both reflect the abandonment of social protocols in favor of the freely-expressed emotions of the petulant, volatile inner self, now fawning and now frothing, now extolling and now excoriating, now sweet and now savage?
Our society tends towards easy sentimentality; does it also tend towards emotional cruelty?
