Ivy climbs a wall from root to roof, and the courtyard beneath it holds a weight you can feel before you can name it.

I have family near Princeton University, and in my most recent visit, they walked me onto the grounds of a place founded in 1746, thirty years before the country around it existed. Murals of Einstein and Oppenheimer line the halls where they once met. Near the campus, inside the Yankee Doodle Tap Room, initials carved into the old oak tables mark decades of students who sat there, Einstein's among them, and a wall of framed portraits holds the faces of alumni who went on from there, Michelle Obama, Alan Turing, Richard Feynman, Jeff Bezos.