The glance is a snapshot of the world.
In a split second, you can’t observe anything, but everything becomes engrained in your memory. Moving cars, the occasional passer-by in the wee hours of the morning. Or how darkness falls. How the faint traces of a sunset give way to complete darkness. How alleys and roads are lit with the soft glow of street lamps.
It’s bad synecdoche: the beginning and the end, the past and the present, moving from one place to another. The moment cannot be captured.