Repost from a comment on our class blog:

I think I finally, kind of, maybe, understand what Derrida was getting at – the desire to know more, to continue to read and learn and explore the lives of people who may be just as ordinary as I am.

Takeaways from this class: retain original order, sometimes the ordinary can be extraordinary, Tinder can pop up when you least expect it to, and there is something special – and difficult to put into words – about exploring someone else’s diaries and personal documents. Inside the archives, I felt like I was able to enter the private realm of another person; whether the documents I examined were 30 years old or 100 years old, there was a musty veil of careful preservation over them. I could probably write an entire paper analyzing the physical ‘object’ that is an archive, but that might be best left for another class.

This has been an eye-opening and enlightening experience and I am going to try my hardest to go back to RBSC and make use of its collection for another class in the future!

Other comments:

This is the third class for which I have used this blog, set up in September 2013 for an Arts One assignment. I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to use it again for class, but I plan to blog my experience going on exchange (barring any weird events) this coming September!

Thanks for the views, Mom. <3