Teaching Transcendence

I like refereeing to libraries and archives as transportive and transcendent places—places that enable broader experiences of time, space, and reality. I don’t usually use such language in classes, so I was surprised but satisfied to read in an evaluation of a session I taught last week (on using historical manuscripts) the comments of a student who wrote that she had learned “that there is a place [at our institution] that connects the past with the present and somehow this connection makes us feel part of something greater.”