sentimental journey

hmm, this was one of my favorite reads in college lit classes. most people probably hate this book because Sterne would agonize and rave for pages about this five second quasi-encounter with some beautiful stranger he brushed shoulders with along the way. i thought it was beautiful how he would read into everything and analyze potentials and possibilities. maybe i liked the book because i was traveling myself when i read it and had been alone for several days, stuck in Belguim without a friend or a place to stay :-). and maybe this lone traveler just missed meaningful human interactions so he would fantasize and create all these dramatic, fantastical scenarios to appease his lonliness. hmm, well, i used to think of myself as pretty sentimental... and then yesterday, my brilliant friend, Buechner, was talking about the sentimental tear that often falls down the cheek at weddings. sometimes these tears are good, they are legitimate responses to the mystery of human love to the transience of things, etc... However, Buechner says to be sentimental like this is often less a reaction to the actual thing happening and more a reaction to our reaction of the thing happening. what we're really crying about is "the pathos of our own tear" - ouch. he says, "it is all innocent enough, surely, except that it keeps us just one step further than we already are, and God knows that's far enough, from the reality of what is going on outside our own skins; and the reality of what is going on outside our own skins is the reality of other people with all their dreams and regrets, their happiness, the pathos not of ourselves for once but of them."

hmm, God, help me to think outside my own skin...