Yeah, there's a physical copy of my dissertation somewhere in the library system of my old school [1]. On a whim, I went to find it a few years after graduating

Yeah, there's a physical copy of my dissertation somewhere in the library system of my old school [1]. On a whim, I went to find it a few years after graduating, and it was (is?) in a special section of the library where there's nothing but shelves and shelves of old dissertations, going back for ~30 years (older than that, and they only have microfilm, IIRC). Thousands of black-bound volumes, with obscure titles on every possible subject. Being in that space gave me exactly the feeling you describe. Each one is an artifact of years of a person's life, in book form. I guess that's true of any book, really, but it feels particularly acute for something like a dissertation. Every one of those unread volumes was a moment of long-awaited celebration (literally commencement) for a person. Humbling. [1] I had to pay for that copy, but I digress. It doesn't kill the romance. I'm a sucker.