Why you should seek something to get "sentimental" about

Introduction. Why do people not like it when you try to logically understand them? What is the mark of a great book? What's missing from our modern lives? Henry Tuckerman, a 19th century writer, answers these questions in his classic essay A Defense Of Enthusiasm. Top insights 👇

Better to be overcome by a great question, than to settle a minor one. Tuckerman: “When, instead of coming to a logical decision, we are led to bow in profound reverence before the mysteries of life, when we are led back to childhood, or up to God…it is then our natures grow."

A great book doesn’t give us a “set of new ideas” as much as “vitality” itself. Any literature worth its name must evoke emotions and not just dry questions. However, by challenging us meaningfully, a good book also does quicken our “mental powers.”

People hide like turtles in their shell when you try to reduce their personhood to a set of measurable traits: “Men, and especially women, shrink from unfolding the depths of their natures to the cold and prying gaze which aims to explore them only as an intellectual diversion.”

Poetry throws a halo around our everyday life and makes it interesting, mysteriously, and pleasantly bearable. Tuckerman on poetry: "It is the breeze that lifts the weeds on the highway of time and brings to view the violets beneath."

But beyond its function as “consolation,” poetry also does something else: it helps us “form images of excellence.” Anything that tells us what to pursue - that helps us formulate a “notion of progress” - draws its power by touching upon a poetic truth.

Tuckerman: "All great men are (trying) to realize in action, or embody in art, sentiments of deep interest or ideas of beauty." Great action is a consequence of a person getting sentimental or enthusiastic about something. Tuckerman says: find things that move you!

Life can't ever me made "mechanical." Tuckerman: "Life is encircled by mystery, brightened by affection, and solemnized by death." We can't avoid "visions of glory and dreams of love and hopes of heaven." The "empire of utility" is a small one; a wider universe exists outside it.

Tuckerman on modernity: “Reverence is seldom awakened by any object, custom, or association. The new, the equal, the attainable, constantly deaden our faith in infinite possibilities. Life rarely seems miraculous, and the commonplace abounds.”

Bottom line. Tuckerman: "What the arrangements of society fail to provide, the individual is at liberty to seek." Let the age be concerned with trivialities - as individuals, we are at liberty to seek reverence, poetry, and beauty.