@var.aunevik: As you may have guessed, this is not about the bagel. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin argues that mechanical reproduction changes how we perceive art. Yes, copies can indeed match the image, but they can never reproduce the original’s “aura”. The aura being its unique presence in one time and one place. Seeing a copy of Mona Lisa is very different from seeing the original. For the bagel, the “original” was not simply the bread and the cream cheese. It was that hotel room, that very morning, it was the hotel cat, and it was the very NYC view. The whole situation gave it aura. Now, whenever I try to make a bagel taste that good again, it always ends up a bleak reproduction. Is that we oftentimes "save" things, because we don't want to ruin its magic? we know that reproducing it often will strip it of its specialness, but is that specialness aura or simply pleasure....?

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Friday 09 October 2026 11:44:00 GMT