and so on and so on.

A few minutes spent at my computer told me what I desperately needed to know: they were all here. Turning from the electronic path to knowledge toward the dusty paper on which knowledge itself was printed and illustrated, I gathered all these books up in the decaying Widener study I am privileged to share with my distinguished colleague and tolerant friend, Herbert Bloch, Pope professor of the Latin language and literature emeritus. Spreading them out on our common desk, I compared what they had to say, and plotted the new evidence over time and space. Suddenly patterns of stunning clarity emerged. I can now practically predict where in the Islamic world between Morocco and Afghanistan a coin was minted if I know its date and where exactly it was found, that is, where a traveller dropped or hid it 1,200 years ago. The trade routes linking together the various regions of Europe, Asia, and Africa in the depths of what used to be called the Dark Ages suddenly loomed forth out of centuries of oblivion.

No single librarian, no single benefaction assembled this diverse array of books. No one ever imagined that these books would be connected in this way. They had come, in bits and pieces in different circumstances. In fact, a recent conversation with a learned librarian revealed the extraordinarily diverse men, women, and funds that had made possible this small part of one scholar's week's work in Widener. How these few books came to be on the shelves when I needed them between classes and committee meetings breathes life into abstractions like "generation upon generation of librarians and benefactors."

The oldest work on my list, the book on Venetian churches, was acquired more than a century ago. It was snapped up on the used-book market, a century and a half after publication, with funds from a legacy left by Charles Minot of the class of 1828, a name that I have frequently met when scouring the resources of Widener. The bulletin of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg was a gift. The czar's academy had itself sent us the complete run of its journals a few years after the Civil War, perhaps, not coincidentally, shortly after Lincoln and the czar had worked together in order to counterbalance British threats of intervention, and not two years after Seward's Folly. Whether obtained by librarian John Langdon Sibley's well-timed plea or through an exchange of Harvard publications with the Academy, these journals have been serving Harvard scholars of various interests since February 1869.

The entire run of the Geneva magazine was acquired in the first year of the Civil War with a subscription paid for by a gift of William Gray (class of 1829). When Gray's funding of the subscription ran out, other funds came into play to keep new issues coming in. They stemmed from graduates and officers of the University from 1817 to 1909 and, in noteworthy fact, between 1887 and 1909, from the fund established by E. Price Greenleaf, who, like John Harvard, was not an alumnus.

The volume from the Eastern Pyrenees, along with all issues then in print, was acquired in 1912 when, thanks to a gift of Mrs. Francis C. Lowell in memory of her husband, Judge Francis C. Lowell, the library began a subscription to the bulletin of this local learned society. And it is a particular pleasure to note that the Kraina journal was a gift in 1912 of an earlier professor of history, Archibald Cary Coolidge, whose directorship of the library marked a decisive step in the history of this extraordinary collection....

If I have continued so long about research before making the connection with teaching, that is because such is the way it truly is. Hours, weeks, years of research, writing, thinking are the price that must be paid for the best teaching. For it is these years of labor that are distilled into the making of every moment of teaching, from selecting the topics to delivering the lectures. We are drawn, all of us, to this marvelous University and to its heart, the library, I think, because the best research is fired by the best teaching, and vice versa....Right now I am giving a new undergraduate course in the Core program, about Charlemagne and the origins of Europe. When I set out on my search for Arab coins, I had already written the lecture on the Carolingians and the Arabs the previous summer. Now I was forced to redo it because of what I found in one privileged week inside Widener. The 110 students who heard the resulting lecture can attest whether the connection was made between research and teaching.

But it is not even in the lectures that we see with crystalline clarity the connection between teaching and research. That moment comes at the end of even the largest lecture course, when the students have the floor, when they can ask the professor the questions in their minds. There is no audience more difficult, more demanding, or more rewarding than a room full of Harvard undergraduates. They know enough to ask good, tough, questions, but are innocent enough not to shun the ones that frighten the field. They are surprised when I tell them, as I routinely must, that no one has ever asked that question. Not only has the question not been raised in my course, not in this University, but nowhere, so far as I know, in the published scientific literature in any language. That is the moment when the professor shifts gears, from virtuoso but disciplined performer of a Mozart sonata to pure improvisation. For each question, it is the total of a life of research that supplies the answer, the context, the explanation--the connection. This University and this extraordinary library are all about connections: connections between teachers and students, connections between students and books, connections among books, teachers, and students.

Before arriving at Harvard in 1955 as a graduate student, i had heard of the mighty reputation of Widener Library, but thought it irrelevant for my field of chemical physics. My very first class changed that view. It was an unanticipated course offered by a famous theoretician visiting that year from Cornell, Professor Peter Debye. Titled "Introduction to Chemical Physics," the course was in fact an exhilarating tour of Debye's life work. In his first lecture, Debye described his classic treatment, published in 1912, of the thermal properties of crystals at low temperatures. This involved an elegant mathematical analysis that enabled one of the earliest and most compelling quantitative tests of the concept of energy quanta. Soon after the lecture, when trying to describe Debye's theory to some fellow students who had not been at the class, I discovered that my enthusiasm far exceeded my comprehension. Consulting a couple of textbooks left me still more confused. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I could find Debye's original paper in Widener.

My memory of that first visit is vivid, although it is now more than 40 years ago. On approaching Widener, I was struck by the notion that it resembled a huge Mayan temple, perched atop a grand pedestal of stairs. The spiritual impact intensified as I descended into the stacks, which seemed sacred, otherworldly precincts. Among the great walls of journals, I easily found the long row holding the Annalen der Physik, plucked out volume 39, blew away the dust, turned to page 789, and began reading what Debye had written when he was about my age. Luckily, his German was uncommonly lucid, and I was greatly excited and reassured that I could readily understand his article. Thereafter, I have often returned to search out original papers by Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauling, and other legendary scientists and scholars. Amid the stacks of Widener, their great papers remain ever youthful.

If lofty Widener library looks like an olympus of learning, it is also many other humble things, as, for instance, an emergency room of scholarship. I keep answering all the time anguished requests sent by colleagues from around the world, asking for help in locating the obscure article or the book lost or unavailable elsewhere, also arranging for colleagues to visit and then accompanying them to get a card for use of Widener. In giving them elementary instructions as to how to proceed with their work, I often warn that they may experience surprise and even despair at actually seeing and touching the quantity and quality of our holdings. Poor souls who considered themselves well advanced in their research before checking our riches have at times complained to me, with some edge of bitterness, that "It's not fair," or that we had "too much to look at." I have also had to perfect the art of the cicerone, agreeing at the beginning on the length of the visit, trying often to keep what could be a whole morning or afternoon to a mere 15 minutes. I customarily tell them about Harry Elkins Widener and of his mother's active part in planning Harvard's new central library. I lead the visitor to admire the self-supporting stacks, and I find myself at a loss to explain why the idea has not been more widely used. Maybe I look too much the unwarranted landlord in my pride at showing such treasures, and often I have to make my points at the expense of the visitor's well-meaning but misguided tributes. The most common one is, "Well, these Americans had money." My answer is: "No, my friend. What these Americans had was the will to have this kind of library, and the money came later. In other places they wanted instead palatial buildings, marble stairways, regally appointed offices, and they also got them."

It would take me too many pages even to summarize my memories (that spooky black-out of 1965!) and to recount anecdotes of Widener Library. I cannot refrain, however, from telling at least the most unforgettable of the latter, which happened a few months after my arrival at Harvard as a junior faculty member in the fall of 1959. As there were not then collection development officers for special areas, the Romance languages department chairman, the late Professor W.M. Frohock, somewhat apologetically told me in our first meeting that my duties would also include advising the library on spending the funds for Spanish books. There could not have been for me more pleasant news, and I started to snatch to my heart's content old, rare editions, incunabula, journal series, and any interesting item that came on the market. Since, for the moment, nobody was active at Harvard in the field of Spanish fine arts, I appointed myself responsible for filling the lacunae in the very sizable holdings we already had in that field. I did not fail to wonder at the same time that nobody ever mentioned to me the word "budget," but I was sure that such a joyful ride after desiderata could not last very long. When one day a note came from the head librarian for collection development asking me to see him in his office, I knew that the moment of reckoning had come, and I went to the appointment with my repertory of ready-made excuses. The officer, Mr. Philip J. McNiff, received me all smiles, and he hastened to offer me the best seat in his office. He started by saying that he was very satisfied with my services to the library, except for a little problem that we should do our best to solve right away. (There it was, and my heart sank!) Of course, he said, it was such a pity that on occasion some of the most interesting choices had already been sold by the time they were ordered. A new arrangement should be made, then, with the library personnel to "search" those desirable items with all due speed and then to order them by cable!

Only then did I realize what it meant to be at Harvard University.

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