Departing Harvard, and remembering the hours and days (and years) at Widener.
An essay by Rachel Gordan, PhD ’11
After seven years as a doctoral student at Harvard, it’s finally time to move on. When I think about what I’ll miss most at Harvard, my thoughts and — more surprisingly — my emotions run immediately to Widener.
There’s the obvious reason: it has everything. Forget the Library of Congress, and leave aside the Bodleian; there will never be a better library for me.
But there are the less obvious reasons, too. Over the years, Widener has become something of a home. I never expected it from a place so imposing.
***
As it did for many PhD students, Widener became my de facto office, my “place of business.” This was not my intention. I’d set up a desk in my apartment, in front of a big window, thinking that the sunny view of a Victorian house across the street and the hustle and bustle of Mass. Ave would be just the sort of cheerful, workaday environment conducive to good writing. Things didn’t exactly work out that way. With my windows open (either because the weather was fine, or because the weather was nasty and the heater in my building was on full blast), there were, inevitably, two law students gossiping just below my second floor apartment. They were strangers speaking of strangers, but their hushed voices made it impossible not to listen in. Lord knows if there’d be a dissertation had I stayed in my apartment where television, radio, and snacks beckoned. I’m also afraid I would have gained ten pounds.
But at Widener I ate, too — outside, on the steps, as soon as it was warm enough in April and as deep into the New England fall as I dared. It’s a wonderful thing to do your work in a high-ceilinged reading room and then walk outside, into the sunlight, and look down on Harvard Yard. You’ll likely hear a guide tell a cluster of tourists, at the base of the stairs, about poor Harry Elkins Widener and his heartbroken mother and her largess. On days when it feels like a sin to stay inside, there is also a ledge around the outer rim of Widener where you can lie on your back, with a book raised over your face to block the sun. Summertime at Widener is like summertime everywhere: the best of living.
The people who truly worked at Widener — the librarians — have made my life and work easier. Pam and Fred helped me track down sources for my dissertations, and Vardit and Elizabeth made others magically appear in Phillips Reading Room. Pam also explained more to me about footnotes, bibliographies, and citations than feels comfortable to admit. I’ve been grateful that they’re part of the Widener family.
***
Working at Widener, however, has meant not just working at Widener, but thinking and daydreaming there, too – sometimes, just being at Widener. I can think of a less than wonderful date (okay, I can think of a few), after which I rushed inside its quiet, no-questions-asked walls (“So sorry, I’ve got to run to the library,” always seemed like a reasonable excuse). Here was a place to collect my thoughts, open a book, and begin again. It was a place where my heart and mind took deep breaths in the fertile quiet, and seemed to grow. If I needed to talk, I could find a friend in the periodical room or in Philips; I knew their spots.
Of course, many times I would sit down to work at Widener only to find that I was too tired or distracted. I was thinking about something a professor or a friend had said; the quiet of the library made me sleepy. But Widener was still Widener: beautiful, majestic, and even welcoming, I daresay (to those with a Harvard ID, anyway). It was a place to sit among industrious scholars – reminders of what I could be, on a better day. Who knows what they were really doing – maybe playing solitaire on their laptops, or daydreaming. And why not? Widener has room enough.
Rachel Gordan will receive her PhD from the Committee on the Study of Religion this fall. She began a postdoc at Northwestern in September.