I vividly remember part of someone else’s life. Of several people’s lives, actually, and I never knew them, nor did they ever know me. They may not remember the moment themselves, but the memory has not faded for me nigh on a quarter-century later.

It was an epiphanic moment many years ago. I was thirteen or so, sitting in the back seat of the family station wagon, heading home from Disneyland. With nothing better to do, I spent the trip idly staring out the window at the passing scenery, none of it remarkable. During a slow stretch of traffic on an overpass somewhere in Orange County, I saw a small group of teenagers languidly walking down a street together, doing nothing in particular. Their movements were casual, carefree.

As I watched them stroll down the pavement in the fading, warm summer sun, I wondered what they were up to. They seemed happy. Was I watching some singular moment in their lives, unwittingly witness to a moment they would remember and cherish forever? I didn’t know, and never will. Since that time, though, the thought of billions of people, all living their unique lives at the same time, all of us so remarkably similar yet still discrete individuals, has never ceased to amaze me. I suppose it was my first profound realization, a grokking, if you will, that the world did not begin and end with me, an abrupt termination of natural childhood egocentrism. An unbidden blossoming of empathy. The human world, unfolded.

Since that time I have had a particular fascination with unposed “slice of life” snapshots. A while ago I found Gene McSweeney’s haunting collection of Lost Films, and have been hungry for more of the same. Happily, Square America landed in my lap this morning, and I’ve been happily sifting through the candid images of people long dead, half-consciously reconstructing their emotions and lives from nothing more than an anonymous photograph.

It’s a beautifully haunting experience, looking through these; every snapshot a bittersweet morsel of time, a peek into somebody’s vanished past. I can’t get enough of this stuff.