The Unexpected Difference Our Words Can Make

Writers write for many reasons. Surely one of the most important is to connect with readers: to have our words make a difference to some reader, sometime, somewhere. 

Here is a story of how words I wrote for the most ephemeral of audiences, to be heard for three or four brief minutes and then forgotten forever, ended up having, a decade later, an impact I could never have imagined.

The University of Colorado Philosophy Department hosts a fabulous conference every summer, the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME), billed as "an international conference geared to offer the highest quality, highest altitude discussion of ethics, broadly conceived." Each conference features dozens of submitted papers as well as three keynote addresses by the most prominent figures in the field of philosophical ethics. In 2009, one of these was Prof. Judith Jarvis Thomson of MIT, who happened to have been my teacher when I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s at Wellesley College; Wellesley and MIIT had a partnership, which continues to this day, where students at one institution could take courses at the other.

I asked if I could give the introduction for Prof. Thomson. I had wonderful material in the notebook I still had from that course, as she was such a charismatic teacher that every sentence she uttered was one I wanted to preserve for posterity. 

In the notebook I even preserved her advice to us for our paper on utilitarianism:

If you can read my tiny writing, you'll see that the main instruction to us was "No eloquence!" Prof. Thomson valued crystalline clarity in writing and despised flowery prose. I also remembered many other pithy pieces of writing criticism she gave me during the time of our acquaintance as well as bracing advice from her mentoring as I applied to graduate school.

So I wrote a page and a half of introductory remarks and delivered them one summer day in 2009 to the RoME audience. I was stunned by the impact of that three-minute speech. One colleague, not known for effusive compliments, called it "the introduction greater than which no introduction can be conceived." At RoME conferences years later, strangers would approach me and say, "You're the one who gave that introduction for Judy Thomson!" Of course, the introduction was so wonderful only because Judy Thomson was so wonderful; it was the details about this unforgettable women that were the unforgettable part of my speech.

This past month, on November 20, Judith Jarvis Thomson died. The chair of the CU Philosophy Department asked if I could send him a copy of my introduction for wider sharing, and it was posted here, on the leading blog of the philosophy profession, the Daily Nous.

I started to get emails: from a University of Maryland colleague from decades ago; from a children's literature colleague who attended the same high school as Judith Jarvis Thomson and had seen my post quoted on their website; from a friend who said my post was the subject of their Thanksgiving dinner conversation, as her son had also benefitted from Prof. Thomson's wisdom; and from Judy Thomson's nephew.

I would never have guessed that a three-minute introduction of a speaker would be widely circulated eleven years later. Oh, writers, little do we know what unexpected power our words may have. And, oh teachers, little do you know how much every utterance from your lips may be cherished by hundreds of students a generation later.