…HBO-style: “In choosing among these idioms of mourning, Lionel Trilling’s great series of lectures, ‘Sincerity and Authenticity,’ published under that title in 1972, comes to mind. Sincerity – what Trilling calls ‘congruence between avowal and actual feeling’- once seemed (to the Romantic poets, say) like an exalted state of existence that could be achieved only with conscientious attention to the heart.

But the ideal of sincerity has long ago been devalued, rendered commercial or quaint. Today, for example, it is associated with Coldplay, mewling God-and-country Republicans and weepie cable-television dramas like Six Feet Under that appeal mostly to women and gay men.

Authenticity, on the other hand, is regarded as rougher stuff, a man’s job. Authenticity is gin to sincerity’s chardonnay. (Look for it on The Sopranos and Deadwood.) It suggests, as Trilling puts it, ‘a more strenuous moral experience’ than does sincerity, as well as ‘a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life.’ Authenticity, in other words, is a confrontation not with the self, which its practitioners regard as elusive and false, but with death, horror, being, nothingness.” — Virginia Heffernan (New York Times )