There’s a power to faces.

Here in the Ivan Vazov National Library in Plovdiv — in a large, gallery like room — there are bookshelves and glass cabinets given over to biographies, histories, and catalogues in translation.

Even the names are transliterated into the beautiful — but opaque to me — Bulgarian script, so that the only familiar features are the medium (book) and the faces: Anne Hathaway, Al Pacino, John Cleese, Will Smith, Woody Allen; all gaze out from the covers of these artefacts.

There is a focus afforded by this limited comprehension. Unable to read even the titles, I look more closely at the faces and indulge that part of the imagination that dares to guess at what the person behind that now duplicated¹ face was thinking in that moment.