#posting for tag directory reasons i'm doing remodeling on the old blog..

[primaveravenus]

A souvenir is a token of authenticity from a lived experience that lingers only in memory: a shell from a beach walk, or a trinket purchased on holiday. Even simple objects embolden the longing to look back and inward into our past, to recount the same stories again and again, to speak wistfully, that gives birth to the souvenir: without the demands of nostalgia, we would have no need for such objects of remembrance. But nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss, and souvenirs are always only fragments of increasingly distant experiences or events, and so are necessarily incomplete, partial, and impoverished. Yet this loss is precisely a souvenir’s power: never fully recouping an event as it actually was but resonating with golden memories. In other words, a souvenir is a potent fragment that erases the distinction between what actually was and what we dream or desire it to have been. Equally important, its existence depends on the impossibility of fulfillment. The longings and daydreams encapsulated by souvenirs can never be fulfilled the cherished experiences exist forever in the past.

Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo : Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing