To be familiar with things, not just objects, like umbrellas or egg-beaters, but the all the cultural artefacts, more or less abstract, some entirely abstract, like recognitions of recognitions; to learn to use them, to make an environment out of them; it all takes time and is a non-trivial accomplishment, but then it rapidly comes undone and disappears as you disappear, as you depart not just the scene, but the very scene of scenes. Children playing, people of various ages seen in the same train carriage or café engaged in the dramas of their various stages of life which are recognised because you have been there too, and because people hide so little these days, so that you feel the spontaneous urge to join in that same stream of expectations, and unpack again that particular gift bestowed in its time on full members of this world, the one you grew up in, and the identical ones that came later, wave after wave of new and fresh faces, because you can never have enough of it, before you recall that it exists now for you only in a pristine and valedictory image, in what might be memories if it were necessary that you lived each one by the book, which of course you never did. They are the icons, these pictures in the pages of the book that turn over by themselves and carry you forward, scene by scene, the one book that was handed to you and that you unwrapped so eagerly once, kneeling bare-kneed on the rug. This perspective was not new, it has been present as a fringe in each of the stages as you entered wide-eyed, a musical background, Galuppi perhaps, the quality of soul, greatest seduction.