Souvenirs

"The souvenir is the complement to the exciting experience. In it is marked the increasing self-alienation of the person who has inventoried his past as dead possessions... Relics come from the past, the souvenir from the extinguished experience."

Walter Benjamin, Central Park

quoted in Esther Leslie, Souvenirs and Forgetting: Walter Benjamin's Memory-work, in Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, Jeremy Ainsley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation, Institute of International Visual Arts, London 1996, p.115