Emerson Place

As an English teacher, I find myself wondering every once in a while what difference my work makes in the world. These are only temporary doubts, of course--I am a firm believer in the value of what I do, but it's nice to see results, no matter how unexpected. Today I got an email from one of my former Richmond students. I'll paste most of it below, although I've changed his name and taken out some of the cheesier parts:

"Dr. Hanrahan,

Hello! It's John Smith, one of your students who wishes you were still at Richmond. I just thought you might find it amusing that I'm interning for an advertising and marketing agency in Washington, DC, and we are doing all the brochures and signage for a community in Lebanon, NH called Emerson Place. Inspired, I proposed that the floorplans be named after his contemporaries and those who he influenced, which was approved. So now there are some two-bedroom, one and a half bath apartments in Lebanon called the Alcott, the Poe, the Melville, and the Thoreau.

Also, the art director incorporated a bit of Emerson into the brochures; the quote(s) "Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart" are in an Emerson-looking font around the borders of each page.

I hope everything is going well for you where you have landed. If you have any additional reading recommendations in the vein of anything you had us read in the class (esp. American Gothic like Lippard) please do let me know. Keep up the good work and keep inspiring people!"

Okay, so I left in some of the cheese. Sue me. (This is the spot where my always hilarious mother would jump in and say, "What, did you give him an 'A'?" She says stuff like that any time I tell her anything nice my students say about me. It's so very funny.)

Seriously, though, how strange (and amusing) to think that someday the upwardly-mobile in New Hampshire will be living in rooms named after great nineteenth-century American writers--all because of a class I taught one semester at the University of Richmond. Not exactly my ideal idea of changing the world, but I'll take what I can get. Too bad they didn't take it a step further and name one "The Fanny Fern." I guess that's asking too much. And no, I have no idea what that (wonderful) quotation from Emerson has to do with apartment layouts. I suppose the art director thought it sounded nice and intelligent. Emerson is so very quotable, but lots of times the contexts seem strange.