strange days

The gorgeous spring air this week has had me pining to hear some Psychocandy era Jesus and Mary Chain, as a perfect soundtrack to the warm, blossom-scented mornings and also as a taste of the 'paisley punk' days of my late teenage years that the springtime seems to speak of.  This morning i brought the cd in with me and saved the songs onto my computer to listen to at work.  

This music always makes me nostalgic for that time and conjours images of lazy days spent wandering about the streets of Ballarat, browsing in opp-shops, reading poetry in the gardens and generally enjoying the carefree post-uni, pre-employed lifestyle.

I do worry, though, whether having those songs so easily accessible, day in, day out, will diminish their value, gradually wear away at the vivid sense of time and place that is attached to them.  I wonder now if i should delete them from here and keep them as a hidden treasure to be dug out from time to time when the occasion calls for it, or if i should just enjoy them in the moment here and now as the mood takes me.

What are your thoughts?  Do you have special mementos - music, film, books or whatever - that you save for rare occasions so as not to lessen the associations they carry, or do you immerse yourself in them and the memories attached whenever you feel like revisiting that mood or spirit?  Does regularly evoking a certain mood through something like a piece of music enhance that association, or alter it?  Do new layers of association diminish older memories, or just add to them?  Can some things be so imbued with a sense of time and place that nothing new can overwrite it, or are such impressions always set in clay and liable to be reshaped?