A Brief Narrative Account After graduating from Harvard College, I found myself by happy accident, assistant to Thomas Whittemore, an eccentric, off-ladder academic with the title, 'Keeper of the Byzantine Seal' at Harvard's Fogg Museum. This experience was the pivot on which my mind and interests swung, radically and decisively. It not only provided me with an opportunity to enter a wholly foreign culture for the first time but to do so with a guide whose interests stretched across periods, topics and places about which I had only the most rudimentary appreciation.