Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

1 July 2025: Today's return to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery moved me more than ever before and it's hard to explain why--at least quickly. 

But I found myself crying standing in front of the tiny marker that just says "Henry," Louisa May Alcott's stone and the American flag she earned working as a nurse in D.C., Hawthorne's family group, and, of course, Emerson's rock. 

The pens, pencils, and little notes left by others get me every time, but even more this time. They are little offerings of gratitude and connection. 

So much in our country seems broken right now, on the day that stupid "big beautiful bill" passes in the Senate. 

These writers, though? They point us to a better way. And they made me who I am--the kind of person who wants to help shape that better way for everyone else. 

There they all are, at eternal rest together, but their words live on. It's corny and cheesy, but it's beautiful and left me wiping my eyes on the Authors' Ridge today. 

"Makes you want to throw a brick..."

13 September 2021: After reading Walden, I finished up Thoreau with my ENGL 312 class today with a discussion of "Civil Disobedience." This is a small but dedicated class, with smart ideas and strong opinions. They struggled with Thoreau's persona at times as we moved through Walden but were so much more welcoming of the version of him they see in this essay. I wanted us to think and talk about why. My post's title was one student's answer: he moved them and motivated them or tapped into something they were feeling. 

I told them that I was wondering what difference it made that they are the age they are at this particular moment, where the world seems so lost and broken. They nodded enthusiastically and talked about the "hermit" urge vs. the "throw a brick" urge. One student said something that I will think about for a while: "We've just come out of isolation. We want to do something now--for other people, with other people." 

Just a great discussion all around.  

"see the sort of things we might see if we only looked for ourselves"

12 January 2021: "Thoreau's desire to elevate nature by featuring its most humble aspect is just one of many things that make me think of his work as modern, not dated or wishy-washy....Thoreau wasn't pushing us to see the world through his eyes, exactly as he saw it. Instead, he wanted us to see the sort of things we might see if we only looked for ourselves--including the interval he opened up between Walden and Walden." --Andrew Menard, Learning from Thoreau

My neighbor Ed, a Thoreau enthusiast, lent me this book. I started it yesterday and found myself appreciating how well Menard frames a point I try to make for students. He also touches on why Walden has been on peoples' minds (including my own) so much during these pandemic days, as we explore the ordinary world around us. 

Important questions from Walden

29 January 2019: "So is it woodchuck-eating or veganism?" --a student in my ENGL 312 class, talking about the "Higher Laws" chapter of Walden.

A terrific day to discuss the second half of Walden today, as a small bit of winter weather rolled in and a very smart class was full of good things to say.

"Civil Disobedience"

22 January 2019: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." --Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"

Great discussion of Thoreau's essay in my ENGL 312 class today. Students responded really well to his words, acknowledging their perfect clarity and how challenging the ideas are (would be) to implement.

Another helpful student analogy

11 September 2017: "It's like a really tough fitness program. It weeds people out in the beginning." --a student in my ENGL 312 class on the opening chapter in Walden.

If you haven't read it in a while (or ever), it might surprise you to remember/learn that Walden opens not with deep reveries about nature, but with roughly 50 pages of economic advice, including monetary tallies. It is, for lots of people, a real barrier to entry. And I always ask students to think about why Thoreau does this. The answer my student gave above is a pretty smart one--only part of the answer, but an interesting part nonetheless.

Thoreau and the tiny house movement...

I've been trying to make this point to my students for the past few years: that some of the tiny house movement's ideas can find their roots in Thoreau. But Rick Diguette, writing in the Washington Post, puts it more elegantly than I could:

"What Thoreau and the tiny-house movement can help us see is how we can simplify our needs and in the process reap benefits that enhance our quality of life. Reducing the size and number of monthly bills will obviously grow your bank account balance, but it can also help you recalibrate the way you perceive necessity. Thoreau didn’t argue that everyone should live in a small cabin, and (most) tiny housers aren’t guilty of that, either. The point is to use what you need rather than consume what you can afford. Scale down rather than add on. Simplify rather than complicate. The soul needs a resting place, but it should be a cozy nook, not a bigger house in a better Zip code."

Teaching Walden in West Virginia

27 January 2017: "I get it. That's what I left my home to get away from." --a student in my ENGL 204 class today, when talking about a passage in Walden which sometimes stumps first-time readers.

Thoreau writes, "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in." After I share that passage with them, I ask my students, "What's so bad about inheriting land?" For lots of people, especially Americans, the idea that inheriting land can be a bad thing initially sound strange. And in this class we've already talked about the important role land ownership takes in early articulations of the messy, malleable, powerful, and lasting idea of the "American Dream."

Of course, it's not really (entirely) about the farm. It's about the lack of choice or deliberation or active embrace of agency. It's about just walking into the life someone else set out for you--that's what Thoreau is pushing back against. It's about imagining you can do something different. As he puts it in one of his most uplifting sentences, "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor." You can make your life different and better. (And no, "better" doesn't mean wealthier...)

That pushing back that Thoreau's doing is so important and I love love love it. It's a key part of his call for us to wake up and live with purpose and meaning and intention.

So my student's response--the one included above--excited me because, hey, he got it! But more than that, it excited me because it reminded me how what Thoreau outlines here can be so hard to live out, especially for people like some of my students, students from places where very few people break free, break out, or break away. People who, in order to live the lives they have imagined for themselves, have to make painful choice--leaving places that seem safe, leaving the people they know, and in lots of cases being seen as traitors--for wanting to do something different. It's so useful for me to remember this and to let that mindfulness cast light back on my reading of Walden.

I often find myself saying, "Easy said than done, Thoreau" when I read Walden, even though I know he's right about just about everything. But I think some of that acknowledgement of how hard it can be gets a bit muffled when I talk to these students about the text. The young man in my class today reminded me of the value of speaking as plainly and honestly as possible about what Thoreau's up to.

"Simplify, Simplify."

4 February 2016: Sometimes you get little moments of recognition from complete strangers that make you feel pretty good about the world. Today--in less than 90 minutes--two separate people stopped by my table at Panera to tell me that they liked my shirt, a shirt I got at Walden Pond with the words "Simplify, Simplify" on it. One guy even said, "That's my man, Henry David!"

Walden

14 March 2014: On Wednesday, we went to Walden. What else is there to say? So thankful to have the chance to visit this place again.

Seeing it again...

13 May 2014: So about Tuesday: First, anyone who knows me pretty well knows that I can be a worrier and that I am creature of habit to such a degree that a big challenge or disruption (like a trip in which you are in charge of everything) can bring out a lot of anxiety. Second, everything we saw and did on Tuesday was something I had done or seen before on my previous trip to Concord. Third, without going into any details, I was not feeling well at all on Tuesday. Those three factors might have made Tuesday a less-than-pleasant day.

But it was actually quite lovely. One chief reason is that I got to see all of these sites again through their eyes. That made me excited to see them again. It made me feel better, feel relaxed. It helped me have fun.

At The Old Manse.

Alcott's grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Thoreau's grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

"The Summer Rain"

Another rainy Monday, so I turn to good old Henry David for some poetic comfort.

"The Summer Rain"

Henry David Thoreau

My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read,
  'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
  And will not mind to hit their proper targe.

Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
  Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
  Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men.

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
  What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
  Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?

Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
  If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
  Struggling to heave some rock against the host.

Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,
  For now I've business with this drop of dew,
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower--
  I'll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.

This bed of herd's grass and wild oats was spread
  Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use.
A clover tuft is pillow for my head,
  And violets quite overtop my shoes.

And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,
  And gently swells the wind to say all's well;
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,
  Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.

I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;
  But see that globe come rolling down its stem,
Now like a lonely planet there it floats,
  And now it sinks into my garment's hem.

Drip drip the trees for all the country round,
  And richness rare distills from every bough;
The wind alone it is makes every sound,
  Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.

For shame the sun will never show himself,
  Who could not with his beams e'er melt me so;
My dripping locks--they would become an elf,
  Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.

Campus construction and Walden

Every time I teach Walden and we get to the conclusion, we spend some time talking about this passage:

"I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!" 

I explain to students that when I read this section, I always think of a certain path on Roanoke's campus, back when I was an undergrad. Roanoke has all of these really lovely brick paths, but this particular path wasn't paved--it was a shortcut students made to sort of bisect an angle made by pre-existing paths. Over the years I was there, the landscapers would reseed that section, but soon enough, the grass would get trampled and that brown, worn-down (and sometimes muddy) path would reemerge. By my senior year, they gave up and put down bricks over that path. It certainly looked nicer than dead grass and mud, but it did feel like a defeat of sorts.

You can be pretty sure that if not for the "ruts of conformity," so to speak, the landscapers would have won that battle. But once a path is already there--once the grass is pretty much dead--it's much easier for students in a hurry to take that shortcut. (Yeah, I get that one could also say that getting off the paved path is defying conformity, but in this case, it's really not true. Only the non-conformists (and sometimes people in really nice shoes) stayed on that paved path.)

Well, now I have an even better example for my students (just in time, as my summer class will get to Walden next week): another group of landscapers have surrendered, this time on a path at near Shepherd's library. From my first week on campus, I wondered how long it would take...

The Walden Project

An interesting article from about an alternative school called "The Walden Project." It sounds like a pretty cool program, although certainly not for everyone.

My favorite part: a former student's answer when asked if she and the other students ever get tired of Thoreau:

"We do, we definitely do," she says, laughing. "We make jokes about him, we make fun of him, but then in the more serious times, we kind of come back to him and his basic message. So it's a love-hate relationship with 'H.D.', as we call him, or 'H-Dog.'"

"Advice To College Students: Don't Major in English"

From seemingly out of nowhere comes this attack on English departments across the nation. Now it's nothing to get too worked up about on the surface--seems to me that Schlafly is going for shock value here and little more, but it is hard to let a comment like this pass without notice: " That's why it was no surprise that Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, was an English major." What a ridiculous assertion--one that the author doesn't even attempt to support in her column. This kind of discourse--where the barbed attack, the killer soundbite becomes the whole story--makes me genuinely sad. And it comes from both sides of the political spectrum.

Beyond that, though, she is simply wrong. When I heard that Cho Seung-Hui was an English major, I was more surprised than anything else. Yes, maybe that says something about how proud I am of my discipline, but I stand by that assertion. Let me take this point a bit further: to imply that English courses made this kid a murderer is so crazy and anti-intellectual that the author should be ashamed. In addition, as we look back on this tragic event and wonder what could have been done to prevent it, please note that it was his English teachers who made the most attempts to help him--to do something to stop him. See here and here for articles discussing their attempts. An English class, where students are free to discuss their ideas and their interpretations of texts and writings, is one of the few spaces where this kind of realization can happen. Yes, in this case, their efforts didn't work, but not for lack of trying.

And here's where I get really idealistic, I suppose: Schlafly implies that an English major that asks students to read newer additions to the curriculum (including, horror of horrors--works by women and minorities!) is a waste of time and money. She couldn't be more wrong. An English major that continues to embrace both the classics (however you want to define them) but also pays attention to shifting critical and cultural debates--that isn't afraid to adjust as attitudes change--is precisely the kind of degree that can change the world. Those who know me well know that I am far from a left-wing radical--about as far away as you can be and still be in a humanities branch of academia. But you cannot tell me that classes I've taught with titles like "Creepy Literature" and "Shocking and Scandalous Nineteenth-Century Literature" aren't worth teaching--that they don't teach students about what makes a text worth reading and how we can use literature to understand ourselves, our history, our world, and the people around us. To me, there's nothing inherently political about that--nothing left-wing or liberal about it.

Furthermore, it's equally ridiculous to act as if the traditional canon isn't also full of violence, alienation, and questions about race, sex, sexuality, and class. Ever really read Shakespeare, Phyllis? Chaucer's "Wife of Bath"? Isn't she a model of good family values! How about Whitman? Or Thoreau? And how about those ancient Greeks?

Okay--I could go on and on, but I'll stop for now. In a little while, I have to go teach my English 204 class. On the agenda for today, Henry Louis Gates' Colored People, a fascinating memoir about growing up black in West Virginia in the 1950s, written by one of the leading academics in the world today. Wonder how Schlafly would feel about that...

Escargot and thoughts on poetry...

This morning I was rushing out the door--rushing for no reason in particular. I wasn't running late and there was nowhere I had to be immediately. Rushing off to get something done, feeling like I am not getting enough done--these are common feelings for me lots of the time. Now I am not complaining--I like my life that way. It helps me feel motivated and productive and (eventually) accomplished. But as I walked out the door today, a little creature was slowing creeping across my door mat.



It stopped me in my tracks for a bit, so much so that I even snapped the picture above. A snail really is an amazing creature, carrying around something as marvelous as a pretty shell. He or she was a pretty brave snail, too, not really hiding in the shell as I leaned over him/her to take a picture.

Can you see where I am going with this? (I hope it's not too cutesy or Chicken Soup for the Soul). Something as tiny as a snail made me stop, take a look, and consider the wonder of creation. It made me slow down, just for a moment, at a moment when I certainly benefited from slowing down.

The rest of the morning, as I thought about the snail, I thought about all the great poems written about little creatures who lead human beings to greater insights about themselves. Here's a partial list:

• John Donne's "The Flea". Donne ingeniously uses the logic in this poem, arguing that since the same flea on a woman he desires might have also fed on him, and since their bloods, therefore, were probably already mixed, they ought to just sleep together.
• Robert Burn's "To a Mouse." Burns is said to have written this poem after turning up a mouse nest on his farm. It contain the famous line "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley." For those unfamiliar with Burns' dialect, it's usually translated into "The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry.'" He also has a poem called "To a Louse," slightly less scandalous than Donne's poem on vermin.
  
• Edward Taylor's "Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold." Taylor's speaker observes a wasp that seems to come back to life and constructs an elaborate conceit in which a sinner is imagined as the wasp and God as the sun that brings him back to life. I'm partial to Taylor these days, as I taught some of his poems to get my job here at Shepherd. He really is an amazing person--a Puritan clergymen who wrote these elaborate and beautiful poems to get himself ready to preach. And most of the poems were forgotten until they were discovered in 1937, over 200 years after he died.
• Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider." This poem kills me--in a good way. The image of the spider/soul throwing out "filament, filament, filament" hoping for a connection is so beautiful and touching. But Whitman has a way of doing that with nature poems. Don't even get me started on "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."
  

I could go on, I suppose (haven't even touched Emily Dickinson yet, or that wonderful bug that Thoreau talks about crawling out of the table in the end of Walden, although I suppose I'd be switching genres then), but you get my point--a point the metaphysical poets, the British Romantics and the American Transcendentalists (and poets, painters, and writers long before and after them) made so well: creation is a constant source of wonder and inspiration for us, a way to understand both ourselves and the world around us. Okay--enough English professor preaching!

Highland Lighthouse

Because Vogel was bound and determined to keep me sufficiently entertained on our trip, she came up with the idea of visiting the Highland Lighthouse, also called the Cape Cod Lighthouse or the North Truro Lighthouse. She read in a guidebook that this spot was one of Thoreau's favorites, and since she knows how much I love Thoreau, she thought (correctly) that it would be right up my alley.

Thoreau visited the lighthouse several times in the 1850s, and wrote of his visit in Cape Cod. Here's just an excerpt I've lifted from this page about the lighthouse:

"The keeper entertained us handsomely in his solitary little ocean house. He was a man of singular patience and intelligence, who, when our queries struck him, rang as clear as a bell in response. The light-house lamp a few feet distant shone full into my chamber, and made it bright as day, so I knew exactly how the Highland Light bore all that night, and I was in no danger of being wrecked... I thought as I lay there, half-awake and half-asleep, looking upward through the window at the lights above my head, how many sleepless eyes from far out on the ocean stream -- mariners of all nations spinning their yarns through the various watches of the night -- were directed toward my couch."

The nerdy nineteenth-century scholar in me got a real kick out of seeing the same view Thoreau saw and imagining him sleeping in the keeper's house. [If you're interested, you can read the entire chapter here.] The admission fee to climb to the top wasn't too bad ($4 a person). I also got a kick out of the guides--men in their 50s and 60s who were completely in love with that lighthouse. Maybe this could be a post-retirement job for my dad! Vogel and I asked them a couple of questions, and they were tripping over each other to answer us and show off which one of them had superior Highland Light knowledge. Hmmm...I take it back--maybe my dad isn't cut-throat enough for the competitive world of lighthouse guides.

Now for some pictures from our visit. First, the lighthouse from outside:



Here's one of Vogel posing for a picture. Doesn't she seem in love with the lighthouse, too? Maybe SHE has a future career as a guide???



We also snapped a couple of pictures of the stairs leading up to the top. The climb is anxiety-producing, to say the least. There are about sixty stairs and then, at the top, two very narrow ladders that you have to climb up.





Getting to the top isn't so much a physical exertion as a mental one. I was so nervous that I was going to fall and humiliate myself. In the end, though, we got to the top like pros and took some pictures of the view. You can kind of see our reflections in the pictures, but again, I think that makes the pictures even cooler, especially since the day wasn't especially clear so they needed a little something extra to make them interesting.






Okay--more later. After all, I should be using this time to finish my syllabi. Bad teacher...

Modernism and Architecture

I read a fun piece in Time about Philip Johnson's Glass House, which has recently opened for tours through the National Trust. I had never heard of this place before, but was really intrigued by it and would be very interested in visiting it. Here's the original article from Time. You can also browse through a photo essay here.



Let me paste the first paragraph of the article:

"WHEN COMPLETED IN 1949, THE HOUSE THAT Philip Johnson designed for himself in New Canaan, Conn., was the most resolute statement of Modernist principles ever set down in a leafy glade. An homage to the ideas of High Modernism developed in Europe between the wars, it consisted of floor-to-ceiling glass on all four sides, which was supported by eight steel piers on a brick platform. Not so much a house as the Platonic ideal of a house, it was also an affront to ordinary notions of domesticity and creaturely comfort, and this at a time when not many office buildings, much less country retreats, had adopted the glass-box look. Johnson's only concession to privacy was a tall brick cylinder set indoors that contained a bathroom. To avoid disturbing the immaculate planes of his design, during the day he didn't even allow a pillow on his bed."

More here--an interesting site about the Glass House, with information about Johnson, 3-d models of the house, and critics' takes on the site. And here, a link to the National Trust site.

Although I would hardly classify myself a fan of the modernist aesthetic Johnson demonstrates in the Glass House, I still find myself captivated by its beauty--the clean lines, the spareness, the pure functionality. To me, the house shows a sort of "practical/functional aesthetic" (I have no idea if that's a real term) that is very attractive. It's not so much that I am drawn to these designs in terms of architecture or decorating. Instead, I am more drawn to the kind of thinking that went into developing them. I am not sure if I am making much sense, so let me try again.

I feel like I try to live my life (and perhaps here I mean mostly my intellectual, professional, and/or academic life) in the spirit this house shows--I like things neat, clean, useful. Now I could never take it to the extreme that Johnson and his contemporaries demonstrated, but their ideas do warrant some reflection. In many ways, perhaps, they aren't all that different from Thoreau and his reminder in Walden: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." When things are simplified and made clear--when the mess and excess is stripped away--well, that can be a liberating feeling, even if you don't like what you see.

This fall, I'll be teaching Modernists and Post-Modernists for the first time in my American Literature Survey courses. I'm both excited and a bit intimidated by the prospect of introducing students to writers like T.S. Eliot, but might use the Glass House as a way of helping to explain Modernism to them. Sometimes visual aids like this do help. Of course, first I'll have to figure out how to explain the connection...

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.