You may know, if you’ve ever let your eyes wander all the way to the upper left-hand corner of this page, that I run a pretty nifty Hemingway site. The site gets something like 800 hits daily. I’m sure a bunch of those are spiders and search thingies and who-knows-what else. But I know that a fair amount of those hits come from actual *human beings*. I know this because – even though it says not to bother and there are no links anywhere on the site to my eMail address and I force readers to come here if they want to send me an eMail – I get about 40 eMails every freakin’ day from high school kids around the world asking me, basically, to do their homework for them.
This is my rationale: If there are 800 hits and 600 of them (and there can’t possibly be 600 bots hitting my page every day, can there?) are from computers or bots or spiders or whatever (not people) and only 40 of them are from slack-offs … well that still means at least 100-something people are going to read about Hemingway. Every day. For over five years now – and that is like a day short of infinity in internet time – people have been reading things I (and numerous others) have written about Hemingway on my Hemingway page. This blows me away. This is awesome. And every now and then I get something like this:
I’m a high school student from a suburb outside of Pittsburgh, PA. I wanted to tell you that your site has been very useful to me in my study of “A Farewell To Arms”. I found the essays on symbolism to be rather interesting and informative. Thank you for your efforts and dedication to what I believe to be a worthwile literary realm – the study of Hemingway. Just thought you’d like to know how much I appreciate what you’re doing.
