"On Longing" by Susan Stewart

1) "The body is the primary mode of percieving scale."

-The body is the root of our understanding when it comes to size/proportion. The body has symmetry, balance, and proportions that take part in understanding scale.

2) "Capacity of objects serve as traces of authentic experience."

-It does not matter what the souvenir looks like, but what the objects significantly mean, and the memory imposed on them. The meaning of the objects themseleves serve as the most pure understanding.

3) "The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three-demensional into the miniture, that which can be enveloped by the body."

-As Stewart says before, "..what is being done here is the transformation of exterior into interior." In other words, everything is being reduced in size, but not by importance. The body is able to depict everything reduced in size since it is the primary mode of percieving scale.

4) "Nostalgia cannot be substained without loss."

-A longing for the past cannot be strengthened without loss. The cause of longing for the past is the loss itself in that moment in history, and it is symbolic because of that loss. A memory is not a memory without a missing someone or something.

5) "To have a souvenir of the exotic, is to possess both a specimen and a trophic."

-To have a souvenir of the extotic is to have it coming from something bizarre, strange, and unusual. This exoticness of the souvenir is what makes the individual become the whole.