What joins the stories of funerals in Norway and weddings in New York, beyond the timing and common iconography, is the way both ask us to think about love — not just as a private sentiment but as a part of public life.
And so Mr. Clapton's feverishly anticipated walk-on — arriving halfway through a 15-night run at the Beacon, the band's traditional spring residency — gave the impression of a survivor paying his respects, airing a private sentiment in an extravagantly public setting.
In poems such as "Oda a Salvador Dalí" (1925 26; "Ode to Salvador Dalí"), Canciones (written 1924, published 1926; Songs), and a series of abstruse prose poems, Lorca sought to create a more objective poetry, devoid of private sentiment and the "planes of reality".
These opponents all appeal to no more than their private sentiment: this is what I like or this is what I dislike.
Neither is any restraint hereby laid upon freedom of thought or inquiry: liberty of private sentiment is still left; the disseminating, or making public, of bad sentiments, destructive of the ends of society, is the crime which society corrects.
This was also, incidentally, an era in which people had relatively few ways to broadcast private sentiments to a specific, public audience.
That may be so, but it makes him, like others in his party, guilty of a kind of doublespeak, their private sentiments at odds with their public stances.
Graffiti has long been a daring means of public confession of private sentiments about everything from true love to the ills of the planet.
But in the meantime a clear sense of public life seems to exist only in the midst of cataclysm, and a public memorial is now fated to be saturated with private sentiments.
It expresses private sentiments through skill and sincerity, both of which last are a privilege, a duty, indeed, of the private citizen, and no monopoly of the prophetically inclined.
I hope this line is between public reporting and private sentiments.
