1. Old albums. How many CDs, cassettes, records do you have? Containing the song to which you had your first dance; the tracks that accompanied you on long drives through the mountains, when the world seemed to be shattering, with you being sent on a fragment of those shatters to a black hole; the song that you heard on the radio-alarm on the last morning of youth summer camp, and swore that if you ever heard it again, you would bawl – but didn’t; the album that made it possible to get through all the studying of your second year of university. Music is memories. They might make you smile in those last minutes before sleep comes, they might bring pain, but they are sweet – they make us who we are.

2. "Je suis triste comme un lendemain de fete" –Alfred de Musset, French poet (1810-1857). We all know how it is. The party runs smoothly, all your friends are there and they all love you, you meet interesting new people, you find a few new wines to try, some handsome man/beautiful woman admires your wit, you feel like the cavalier/belle of the ball.
Then you come home, and cannot sleep, and when your mind does stop racing and shut-eye comes, your night is fitful; you awaken the next morning hung over, puffy-eyed with a grey pallor, to find that the dog has piddled on your shoes and that you have no plans for the day except cleaning. Your friends have gone on holiday, and you are alone.

3. Industrial landscapes. Take them against a pure blue sky, objects of magnificence, creations of man, nothing organic whatsoever. Ignore the lack of nature, and admire how intelligent can be the human mind. Yet there is ambivalence, because these creations are ultimately harmful. The austere blueprint on a brown terrain. We were sitting on the boat one night last summer, observing the passing scenery, mostly factories and refineries. It was impressive, and beautiful. Or, the glow of hundreds of little lights at an oil refinery seen from the highway at 4am – a sea of shining in the blackness. Bernd and Hilla Becher.

4. Moving to a new country. You go, hoping for a better future. It can be hard – the language is new, everyone is a stranger, you have no place to live, and maybe no job set up. But you do it, because there is something in you that says "I must". You are alone, and you cannot call "home" when you want to, because there is a 10-hour time difference. What is home? Who are you in a new home, a different country? It’s scary, and often worth it. You go, hoping to find yourself.

5. Old books. Someone wrote that book that has been thrown out by the rubbish bin. And someone worked to edit it, to lay it out, to print it, to bind it and to sell it. No one does something because he knows that it will be considered worthless. Smell the pages; they bring up memories of times past. Books tell a story, from the dedications on the inside cover to the markings on the pages to the words of the text themselves. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne summed it up, when, quoting some Latin writer for which I still cannot find the reference, he recalled that the masterpieces of today are the paper used to wrap fish at market tomorrow.