The atoms in a human body have a history that began long before the body existed. Between the early universe and an ordinary moment of human life lie stars, chemical elements, water, cells and countless changes of form. Within follows those connections, asking how the knowledge scattered across different fields can become a coherent picture of the world we inhabit.

The account begins with philosophical questions about existence, difference and relation, then moves through the formation of matter, the lives of stars and the conditions that make life possible. Physics, chemistry and biology become parts of a connected account: how structures arise, how they persist, and how a living organism comes to sense and respond to its surroundings.

As the account approaches human experience, the questions become personal. What makes a self? Where does one person end and another begin? How can freedom be understood in a world of causes? What do connection, responsibility and mortality mean for someone who is themselves part of the process they are trying to understand?

Sergey Yemelin brings these questions together in accessible language, with illustrations and a distinction between scientific findings, philosophical arguments and his own hypotheses. The uncertain parts remain open to revision. Dark matter, the smallest structure of space, subjective experience and the future of thinking machines mark places where an account of reality still meets unanswered questions.

Within is written for readers who want to connect what they know about the universe with the fact of being alive inside it. Its central invitation is to examine the picture as a whole: where the connections hold, where an argument needs more support, and what might change when we learn more.

An eye can look out from an ancient object, a religious image, a state emblem or a camera above a shop door. We may recognise the shape instantly, yet its meaning changes with the people who made it and those who encounter it. The Story of a Glance begins with that familiarity and the unsettling feeling that even a drawn eye can seem to look back.

Sergey Yemelin follows the eye through objects and practices across history: shell eyes set into ancient faces, Egyptian amulets, protective symbols, images used in worship, and the eye placed within a triangle. The search asks who made each object, what it was used for, and what people understood it to do. Similar forms invite comparison, while their different histories resist a single explanation.

The inquiry moves from sacred and protective images to the authority of seeing. State symbols, photography, surveillance and recognition technologies raise questions about who gets to look, what a record can reveal, and how a person can be reduced to an image or a category. Being seen can offer recognition and care; it can also expose someone to judgement and control.

Another part of the story takes place in the body. How do eyes and brains produce the world we experience? Why do we notice faces and watching eyes so quickly? What can attention miss? Chapters on light and quantum experiments examine what observation means in physics, alongside the very different experience of a person seeing and interpreting something.

A personal narrative runs through these inquiries. Childhood memories, years spent photographing faces and the effort to understand his own responses bring the author back to ordinary encounters. The question gradually shifts from what an eye symbol means to what happens when we give another person our attention.

Illustrated and written for a general reader, the book brings history, religious traditions, neuroscience and physics into a reflective account of looking. Its title also names a personal story: how one person’s view changes as familiar images become harder to take for granted, and as looking more carefully becomes a way of living.