Continued:

Have you ever seen something that felt so much like it belonged to you that you simply could not leave it behind and walk away?

I bought the spectacles and took them to an optician to have the lenses replaced. The optician was surprised, but he too thought the frame was beautiful and unusual: one of those old frames that are seldom seen now, or that few contemporary tastes would choose. He agreed to replace the lenses. After the work was rejected once by the Nikon lens workshop in Sydney during quality control, I finally received the glasses today, and this is the first photograph of me wearing them.

No new pair of spectacles could have given me this sense of familiarity. These glasses will accompany me through many books, and despite all that companionship something mysterious will always remain about them: the eyes that once looked through them, about which I will never know anything. And who knows—perhaps one day someone else will ask the same question and know nothing of the paths that these glasses and I once travelled together.

We remain heirs to the past without ever fully understanding the depth of the feelings, stories and lives that came to an end within it.