Pull up a chair, dear reader, join us at the breakfast table. (I cannot begin to tell you how much it gives me pleasure to think that there are several of you reading this with coffee cup in hand as a morning routine while I write the next installment. Community!)

“It’s a complicated issues.” “I know.” “We should make a list of all the questions.” “Well, there is only one interesting one.” “No, there are at least two!” “Persuade me.” “Let’s look at the list:”

• There are people who enjoy things because they own them, and the ownership does something for them: signal status, boost self-esteem, soften the mid-life crisis. In fact, if I put you in a situation where (false) feedback on your performance lowers your self esteem, your appreciation for the things you own goes up, as if they enhance the value that was just threatened. Same for the choice you make in buying something after I threatened your fragile ego: you go for luxury goods over garden variety objects in this situation. —-We agree, not particularly interesting, our grandmas could have told us that, right? Or any wife of the convertible-buying 50-year old….(This is, by the way, true for Westerners in these psychological experiments, not for others from collectivist societies, like Asians – threat to a sense of self seems to be of less concern there.)

• People are attached to objects because they connect them to the past, remind them of the past, allow them to show respect for the past. Much of it is linked to a sense of continuity, across your own life time and between generations, that many cherish. —-True, we agree, and not especially interesting, since it makes perfect sense given how memory works, attachments are formed, and group (tribal) membership is beneficial for the individual. (Never mind that the Jewish grandmas cited above also preach the value of letting something be verfallen (by-gone).

• People react to historical or rare objects with awe – framing the letter Buzz Aldrin sent them, or getting shivers when touching Charlemagne’s throne. It is almost like the physical connection provides a worm hole into the past, and some essence is connected to us. Now, that IS interesting, we both agree. Why is that? How does it make you feel connected to history and why does that matter to you?

• People vary in how much they attach to objects as possessions, or as links to personal history, or how much they have emotional responses to historic objects, or all of the above. Where do these individual differences come from? I find that highly interesting, my breakfast partner not at all – too many variables under consideration, therefor hard to test scientifically. Note to self: scour the research literature and see if someone has come up with a plausible answer….
  

For us this is a continuation of a conversation we had while visiting the strangest little museum in Los Angeles, two weeks ago, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Like the aristocratic collections and cabinets of curiosities assembled in early modern Europe, which were shared by their owners to reflect their status as powerful individuals of knowledge and prestige, it offers a seemingly random mix of exhibits acquired by chance. In fact, it offers – sufficiently dimly lit that you can’t be sure of anything – a hodgepodge of serious scientific objects and description of processes, and whole rooms full of things that are completely made up, nonetheless so perfectly imitating scientific explanations that they are frankly more amazing than the real thing. For someone like me, who is not partial to authenticity to begin with, it was a wondrous time. The creativity and wit and knowledge about museum culture was mind boggling. (They also have live birds wandering around in the museum – my kind of place…) If you can’t make it there in person, the next best thing is to read this: Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Written more than 20 years ago, every word holds.

Less of a mystery novel, and harder reading, is Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It explains, better than I can, the psychological effects of the “aura” of a historically significant object and how it relates to our cravings for authenticity. Just the thing, over the holidays!

Photographs today are my homage to thorny issues and sticky topics.

Music today is by special request: the thing that literally reminds us, the souvenir, captured by Samuel Barber.