“I’d save every day like a treasure and then

Again, I would spend them with you”

– Jim Croce, “Time in a Bottle”

In Berlin this past summer, I tried not to buy too many souvenirs. I passed over a pink T-shirt rhinestoned “BERLIN PRINZESSIN,” a pendant necklace that was supposedly a shard of the Berlin Wall, and thousands of pieces of DDR memorabilia at sidewalk-side stands in the more touristy areas. I allowed myself a postcard of the TV Tower with a huge cat swatting at the ball on top, a print from the Berlin-set film Wings of Desire, and an “I <3 BERLIN” shot glass. This collection, I determined, was tasteful.

When it came to purchasing souvenirs for others, however, I wasn’t so selective. One of my sisters collects magnets for her college dorm fridge, so I had to get her one, a golden Victory like the statue in the main thoroughfare of Mauerpark. And then I found a silver-and-abalone bracelet in a Kreutzberg Flohmärkt — it would be rude not to buy something that so obviously evoked her. My other sister surely needed a handmade Japanese bowl with little polar bears painted around the rim, and my best friend had to have a pair of gold starfish earrings. A hot pink lighter in a souvenir shop had my college friend’s name inscribed on it. For my dad, there was a silver keychain with a tiny mountain goat, and for my mom, a box of German chocolates.

I didn’t buy these things all at once. The purchases happened when I came across something that reminded me of the person and, in a bout of homesickness — Heimweh, in German — I needed to buy the souvenir to prove I still thought of them while away. The souvenirs gratified me as much as they did the receivers. I could take the train and the bus and walk down the tree-lined suburban street to my dorm, wrap up the bracelet I bought for my sister, and remember that her world, not this one, was my real life. I would go back. 

Without the souvenirs I couldn’t tolerate the weightlessness of living alone and abroad, as though I might spin out with the push of a breeze off the Spree River, momentum alone, blasting through opera houses and cafes and techno clubs into total illogic, absolute meaninglessness. The solidness of these objects anchored me to the bearable, sensible reality of the people I loved. 

Heimweh has an opposite, though: Fernweh, which translates roughly to “farsickness,” or the desire to travel. In Berlin, I felt pulled in opposite directions by Heimweh and Fernweh. Buying souvenirs gave me a sense of location and heft; I could dissociate the trip from reality by externalizing it materially. It resolved my homesickness without compromising my ability to experience new things. Vertigo at the top of the TV Tower became a miniature trinket version, something I could hold and coolly inspect. When that externalization of experience was with the intent of giving it over to someone I loved — if I bought the mini TV Tower for my grandmother — I became even more insulated from the reality of the experience because I could focus on my homecoming. It was material proof that soon I would be home, and I would hand the ceramic miniature to my grandmother, and she would perch it on her mantle, and Berlin would be as a dream. They made me, in a way, at once both home and abroad.

This is not unique. There’s the Japanese tradition of omiyage, usually regional food products or handicrafts, as an apology for their absence. Filipino pasalubong, similarly, is usually food shared with relatives, and it’s meant to express renewed gratitude for the traveler’s loved ones upon their return home. These purchases ground the adrift traveler.

Souvenirs are also memory deposits. One buys a souvenir while traveling to pin down the moment of purchase, as though the look or feel or taste of that object, in some future moment, might transport the buyer back to that trip. They are an attempt to defy the transience of travel, to preserve the feeling of a moment in an object. In that way, they satisfy Fernweh.

To me, souvenirs represented the moment of the trip; a fulcrum to scales that could tip either way. They could collapse the time between the moment and a loved one, or between the moment and future moments of reminiscence in the other. I bought souvenirs for my family in part because I couldn’t stand the perfect balance of scales — Heimweh and Fernweh, home and abroad, past and future — that threatened to strand me in the raw present.

–

In Berlin, while I bought that abalone bracelet, I felt real joy. The sunshine was glorious, and I was on a great date at a flea market, and the present seemed to unfold into a limitless future with the ease of summer turning into fall. It was exactly like every moment I’ve ever been really, truly happy. 

Another day, I rode the S-Bahn, the Berlin commuter rail, late at night. The car was packed with people: a pretty young couple sat across from me with a toddler giggling up at them, a thin old man in a bowler hat read a creased book across the aisle, and a group of college-aged Brits laughed loudly and sipped beers, their fingers hooked around the silver stanchions. And I was alone.

I was in Nighthawks, that lonely painting, stranded in the bluish cold while others dined in the yellow restaurant. There was no one I loved for a thousand miles in any direction, and no one who loved me. I knew that was impermanent, but reality had no bearing on the freezing hollowness that billowed through me. It was exactly like every moment I’ve touched real grief.

Each time I feel total joy or grief, I think: It has always been like this. Every real joy is the same blinding light, and every real moment of grief the same claustrophobic dark. Each time I touch one thread it’s as though I can feel it running alongside me, through my fingers like wind outside a car window. The normal spectrum of feeling is bounded by the threads. And I am there, waiting to tap back into the light or dark — oblivion either way. 

I imagine an analogousness between the role of the souvenir and the thread metaphor that haunts my happiest and saddest moments; the one may be better understood by comprehending the other. Both store a concentration of feeling. Both can annihilate time. The thread of joy collapses all moments of real happiness into one another such that I cannot distinguish between those moments, and all memory of any other state is obliterated. The souvenir collapses the time between the moment of travel and future moments of remembering. Both create a shining, totally absorbing continuity.

I stare at the Wings of Desire print above my desk. A coiffed, dark-haired man in a long overcoat gazes down over Berlin from the edge of a tall building. Translucent wings branch from his back. The world is black and white and I am again in the historic cinema. The orchestra is warming up, and my heart with it. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve been away from Berlin for a week or a decade. The threads and the souvenir are latent, impervious to the weathering effect of regular experience, squirrelled away from time. They are ready whenever you are.

I want to imagine what it would be like to bottle every moment of pure joy in my life, to be able to just reach out and grab hold of some material token that could instantly elevate me to total elation, like an über-souvenir. A Monet-printed hand fan, a Brazilian Carnaval mask, a novelty beer stein — the object itself would be secondary in importance to its infusion with every good and beautiful moment I ever had.

I don’t think it would be enough. Like any trip, there would come a moment of interruption. A few minutes while your friend is in the bathroom at a restaurant, a trip alone on the train, something to break immersion. I imagine it would be very lonely. 

Still, maybe it’s worth it to try as hard as you can to hold on to happy moments just for yourself. They’re like a rainy-day fund of happiness. To hold onto whatever joy you’re lucky enough to feel, however, only to give it to someone else, is an act of stunning generosity. It lifts time from your shoulders. It feels like allowing someone to slip their hand into that forward stream of life and touch, for a moment, the sum of all your joys.

–

My class was on critical theory, so I read Baudrillard in Berlin. He wrote that the existence of a simulacrum, an exact replica of a thing, renders both the original and the simulacrum inauthentic. It would follow that the creation of the souvenir renders the actual experience inauthentic. He takes an example from Borges: If an emperor were to create a life-sized map of his empire replete with perfect detail, it would cover the territory and make the land itself as inauthentic as the replica.

In the case of the souvenir, however, even Baudrillard would agree that it retains the charm of a poor copy, what he calls the “poetry of the map” — the creative and interpretive differences between the real thing (the land) and the replica (the map). This is part of the beauty of the souvenir. Its purpose is to hold fast to something as abstract as a memory of a certain day in a certain place, and that memory’s expression again becomes abstract in the physical form of the souvenir. An Eiffel Tower keychain has little to do with the actuality of being in Paris, and even less practical purpose to the purchaser. Part of its charm lies in how far off it is from the real thing. In the work of remembering, we have pictures and videos for verisimilitude. Souvenirs are about holding on to a feeling we know, deep down, was ephemeral.

The gift-souvenir, however, makes an experience belong to two people: the person who bought the souvenir and experienced the thing but also the person who was thought of. I gave my sister my joy, that day in Berlin, by bringing her home a silvered piece of it. She wears it every day.

My grief I keep for myself, stored in crinkled tickets for three-hour German operas I couldn’t comprehend, a red bandana from my grandfather, a shoebox of old letters under the bed. These things, I avert my eyes from. There’s a lyric from “Here’s Where the Story Ends” by The Sundays: “It’s that little souvenir, of a terrible year, which makes my eyes feel sore.” One day, maybe, I will be brave enough to let them carry me far enough into my grief to sit through its eyesore-ness, to better understand its shape and my own. One day, I might be brave enough to show it to someone else.

Brave, because gifting a feeling to someone is a little like letting someone graze the distilled threads of your joy or grief. It’s a little like telepathy. It’s a little like falling in love; changing the meaning of your life by sharing it with someone else.