Tati

“SENTIMENTALITY
The valuing of emotions over reality. Sentimentality is widely considered out of touch, weak. Very often, those who express concern about (or even an interest in) the conditions in which farmed animals are raised are disregarded as sentimentalists. But it's worth taking a step back and asking who is the sentimentalist and who is the realist.
Is caring to know about the treatment of farmed animals a confrontation with the facts about the animals and ourselves or an avoidance of them? Is arguing that a sentiment of compassion should be given greater value than a cheaper burger (or having a burguer at all) an expression of emotion and impulse or an engagement with reality and our moral institutions?
Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, "I'm in the mood for a burger," and orders it. The other says, "I'm im the mood for a burguer," but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead