The Token and Quotes Responses

The Tokens Response

My experience reading Christopher Turner’s The Tokens was gloomy and eye-opening. Though I assumed the number of abandoned children would have been high, seeing the four and five digit numbers plainly in front of my eyes made me really think about the enormous amount of work that went into the hospital and how many young lives were bettered or saved. Despite the impact of this information, the numbers are much less saddening than the description of the individual tokens. Up until the token descriptions, I was thinking of the program as one whole piece of history. The depictions of the specific trinkets got me really thinking about how each one of those children had a life that was as significant to them as my life is to me. Each had parents that they missed the opportunity to love, like I love my parents. Each had memories special to them and each a token to represent the family memories that were absent. My back and forth thought process between the individual and the whole is something that happens often in my brain and can make me very emotional because it applies today as much as it applies to London in the 1700’s. It is brain-wracking to me, to think that simple things such as thimbles, brooches, and even the word filled papers that I have just read, can represent that idea.

Quote Responses

I am naturally a very nostalgic person and I easily relate to most of the quotes, though sometimes it is not in my best interest. I often times become too attached to essentially unimportant things and I try to tell myself that everything is temporary, in order to more easily deal with loss. This relates to the quote, “Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss.” The statement brings me such a bitter-sweet feeling that I have felt so many times in the past. I also feel a connection to the quote, “The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into a miniature that can be enveloped by the body.” To me, it explains how a souvenir can take every sensory investigation from a particular time, cut out the superficial or stereotypical aspects, and represent one persons uniquely specific experience.