Keywords: collecting, nostalgia, longing, hoarding, romanticism, remembering, reminiscence, forgetting, amnesia.
I am intrigued in one's tendency to form sentimental bonds with objects; and in some cases this tendency turning into an act of collecting. I am a loose collector myself, like many people, saving movie tickets, coasters from bars, posters of concerts, business cards, clothes, etc. This habit of saving, in my case, is mostly to be able to reminisce moments and people. It is about being unable to throw something away, not because maybe I'll need it one day, but because it reminds me of things and serves as a kind of diary.
Although I've been a random and disorganized "collector" for a while now for the reasons I mentioned above, I never really investigated this habit until Orhan Pamuk's novel Museum of Innocence opened my mind up to the possibility that objects can be more important in terms of their meaningfulness to a person rather than their functions. In the protagonist's case, the objects are a link to a loved one and serve as parts of that person. The objects are almost totems; they are fetishised and preserved carefully and ceremoniously. They are objects of nostalgia.
Wikipedia describes nostalgia as "... a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations". The origins of the word are nóstos and álgos, two Greek words meaning homecoming and pain, respectively. The roots of the word mark nostalgia as something melancholic. It was coined as a word to signify a sort of homesickness; longing for the familiar things far away or far in the past. Nostalgia is usually embedded in memory, or more likely a romanticised interpretation of memory*. But is it possible that nostalgia has other sources apart from memory? Can you feel nostalgic about a point in the past which you did not experience?
*Daniel Kahneman's speech for TED titled "The riddle of experience vs. memory" distinguishes within a person two entities: the experiencing self and the remembering self. According to Kahneman, the way we evaluate our lives while experiencing it and later while we are remembering is significantly different and it affects our perception of our happiness. Nostalgia
Sehnsucht
This article was interesting in the way it connects some cases of hoarding with nostalgia
