Lance and Susan Brind Morrow to speak at Fust Library
BY JANE GENIESSE
Dare we call them learned? Why not? They are wordsmiths, absorbed with history, literature and languages. They have traveled far and written eloquently of what they saw. Now Lance and wife Susan Brind Morrow are settled on a farm with a dog they love and field mice of which they feel less kindly, as the mice also enjoy the warmth of their 18th century farmhouse in the midst of fields in the Finger Lakes District of northern New York that long ago were orchards planted by Johnny Appleseed. The Iroquois once lived here too, at least until George Washington sent his general to destroy the trees and banish the resident Indians to make room for white settlers in a brutally acquired new land.
You have probably read the essays by Lance Morrow in Time Magazine or more recently in the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of eight much-praised books, winner of the National Magazine Award and a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C.
Just a few days ago, the Academy of Arts and Letters honored Susan with its 2022 award in literature. A classicist and linguist conversant in Latin, Greek and Arabic, Susan is an archeologist with long experience in Egypt, who startled the Egyptological community in 2015 with her new and thrilling interpretation of the ancient Pyramid Texts. These were buried for some four thousand years until the tomb on whose inner walls they were carved was discovered in 1880. Recognized as the world’s earliest extensive body of writing, they were nonetheless dismissed as incoherent—an incomprehensible babble of myths and incantations. Susan’s brilliant study revealed them to be a grand poem, a religious and philosophical work exploring the mystery of life that offers astonishing parallels with the world’s great religions. Scholars consider it a monumental study.
As a 13-year old boy, Lance, son of two Washington D.C. journalists enduring the hardships of the Great Depression, resolved to convert to Catholicism. Perhaps it was his Jesuit teachers who sparked his abiding interest in ethical issues along with the curiosities and contradictions in American culture. These have continued to fascinate him and inform writing that is elegant and rich with anecdotes and sparkling observations. His 2020 exploration of the role both religion and money have played in America is the subject of “God and Mammon,” a highly readable look at the divisions that afflict America today and even a passionate plea for moderation and mutual respect.
Susan, whose mother was descended from Scottish landowners in Canada, was born in Geneva, in the Finger Lakes, where her father was Chief Counsel to New York’s Department of Education. Her family has a tradition of, as she puts it, “the specificity of nature.” Her parents inculcated in her a delight in the nature of things, whether trees, insects, animals or the colors of the sky, and at fifteen she entered Barnard College. There, a professor ignited a love of languages that soon had her reading the classics in Greek and Latin, and in graduate studies at Columbia, Arabic and finally Egyptian hieroglyphs. No surprise then that Susan ended up with long wanderings in Egypt’s Western Desert and the Sudan, out of which came her first book, ”The Names of Things,” in 1997. This success was followed in 2006 by “Wolves and Honey,” a lovely story of her home’s area, and “The Dawning Moon of the Mind,” on the hieroglyphs in 2015.
The Johann Fust Library Foundation is honored to present Lance and Susan Brind Morrow in the Library’s loggia and courtyard. Lance will speak on March 22 at 4 p.m., and Susan will talk on March 24 at 4 p.m. The events are offered at no charge to the public, but registration is required on the Foundation website, JFLFBG.org.
