When I studied journalism forty years ago, our college classes gathered in the same building where other professors taught literature, history, philosophy, and theater. Our proximity to each other suggested that all of this wisdom was connected in some way.
Perhaps being a good journalist also meant connecting to the most beautiful words and ideas the world had produced, as well as the story of how the human race had fared so far.
But I was still too young to understand how important it was to know culture – books, music, Greek legends and classical paintings – to better understand current events. This lesson emerged for me during breaks in the campus student union as I sipped coffee, opened the latest issue of Time magazine, and read Lance Morrow’s back-page essays.
Morrow, who died last year at age 85, had a place at the back of the magazine because he was supposed to have the last word on the week’s events. His essays were meant to be a kind of summary—a small moment of clarity that would make the confusion of the news seem, however briefly, part of a larger pattern of meaning.
Morrow, deeply cultured and attentive to historical precedent, might cite Helen of Troy in an article on the Falklands War or compare the violence of Iranian politics to the excesses of the French Revolution.
He was educated, but not dryly.
Morrow could also be funny, and he knew that his country could be shaped more profoundly by a popular sitcom than by an act of Congress. One of Morrow’s best essays was on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” I still know by heart his description of idiot Ted Baxter, the show’s TV presenter. 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 me and told me that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. In his next essay after the tragedy, Morrow summed up the loss beautifully: “The mission seemed symbolically impeccable, the furthest reach of a perfectly American ambition to cross borders. And he just disappeared into thin air.
Morrow continued to inspire me when I left college and went into journalism. During a frosty visit to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1981, I purchased a copy of “Fishing in the Tiber,” one of Morrow’s collections of essays, at a local bookstore. I have the book open now, and the time of that distant night in Cleveland comes back to me, the wind like a hundred knives at my back.
In a broader sense, all of Morrow’s books, including “Second Drafts of History” and “The Noise of Typewriters,” are deeply sensory to me. He had a genius for helping readers not just think but feel, which is why I’m rereading him this winter.
All these years after first encountering some of these phrases, they remain inexhaustibly new.
Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.