"We flock to archives searching for secrets, treasures, and scandal, all while declaring with a straight face that what we’re really doing is “research.” Gossips, academics, historians, curiosity-seekers, we say we’re looking for context. But what, we hope, is to be the first to discover the authentic yet overlooked key point, or evidence of a crucial but missing detail, or to recognize a previously unmapped pattern revealing a new path to understanding. It is a contradictory experience--the sacred tinged with a kind of profane voyeurism.

An archive as beautifully and thoughtfully assembled as the Rauner Library is something like a shrine, but it’s way better--and not only because it is newer. We are not pilgrims looking for proof that writers and artists existed--we don’t need a toe or an ear (although we might well have them). What the Rauner Library archive is, and what it will continue to be for all who come to it, is a source of enlightenment. A permanent collection of what had seemed once irretrievably lost to the past, and a powerful reminder of the sanctity of shared experience. Scandalous as it may be.

When we approach archives, we know that what will be most glorious is what will be most suppressing. It’s an immersive experience. The fully present nature of simple, ordinary objects —now extraordinary objects—becomes transcendental. Being among the papers and items is a different experience from merely seeing or reading them virtually or any other medium. I don’t want to be in the presence of a hologram Mario Puzo.  I’m not even quite sure I want to be in the presence of the real Mario Puzo. I do want to write a note on Mario Puzo’s typewriter. And so I did."