When I studied journalism four decades ago, our college classes gathered in the same building where other professors taught literature, history, philosophy and theater. Our nearness to each other hinted that all of this wisdom was tied together somehow.
Maybe being a good reporter also meant connecting with the finest words and ideas the world had produced, along with the story of how the human race had fared so far.
But I was still too young to grasp how important it was to know culture — books, music, Greek legends and classic paintings — as a way to better understand current events. That lesson would emerge for me during breaks in the campus student union while I sipped coffee, opened the latest copy of Time magazine and read the back-page essays of Lance Morrow.
Morrow, who died late last year at 85, had a spot at the end of the magazine because he was supposed to have the last word on the week’s events. His essays were meant as a kind of summing up — some small moment of clarity that would make the muddle of the news seem, however briefly, part of a larger pattern of meaning.
Morrow, deeply read and alert to historical precedents, might cite Helen of Troy in a piece about the Falklands War or compare the violence of Iranian politics to the excesses of the French Revolution.
He was learned, but not dryly so.
Morrow could also be funny, and he knew that his country could be shaped more deeply by a popular sitcom than an act of Congress. One of Morrow’s best essays was about “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” I still know by heart his description of dull-witted Ted Baxter, the show’s TV anchorman. Morrow memorialized Baxter as a man “with the mane of Eric Sevareid and the brain of a hamster.”
In 1986, I was on campus when a classmate approached and told me the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded. In his next essay after the tragedy, Morrow beautifully summed up the loss: “The mission seemed symbolically immaculate, the farthest reach of a perfectly American ambition to cross frontiers. And it simply vanished in the air.”
Morrow continued to inspire me as I left college and took up newspapering. During a bitterly cold visit to Cleveland, Ohio in 1981, I picked up a copy of “Fishing in the Tiber,” one of Morrow’s essay collections, in a local bookstore. I have the book open now, and the weather of that long-ago night in Cleveland has come back to me, the wind like a hundred knives in my back.
In some broader way, all of Morrow’s books, including “Second Drafts of History” and “The Noise of Typewriters,” are deeply sensory for me. He had a genius for helping readers not only to think but to feel, which is why I’ve been rereading him this winter.
All these years after I first met some of these sentences, they remain inexhaustibly new.
Email Danny Heitman at [email protected].
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