An old toy can shorten the distance between strangers born centuries apart.

Grand objects in museums tell you what a society wanted to be remembered for. A worn toy tells you something smaller and harder to fake: that a child was given something to play with, and that an adult thought this mattered enough to make. Play is one of the few human activities that needs no translation, so a small carved animal collapses a few hundred years in a way a monument never quite manages.

In the next old place you visit, look for the ordinary things rather than the important ones. Ask what a person did on an unremarkable day, and the distance shrinks on its own.