“A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this, and it mattered to me.’ Beauty is fugitive, being frequently found in places to which we may never return or else resulting from rare conjunctions of season, light, and weather. How, then, to possess it…? The camera provides one option. Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a previous scene can decline with every click of the shutter. Or else we can try to imprint ourselves physically on a place of beauty, perhaps, hoping to render it more present in us by making ourselves more present in it…A more modest step might be to buy something…as a reminder of what we have lost, like a lock of hair cut from a departing lover’s mane.”

~Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel