The Sound and the Silence of Toni Morrison

It was early spring and snow was melting along the curbsides with a slow, metronomic drip. Around three-thirty in the afternoon, I left the library, and made my way across Harvard’s campus to Sanders Theatre, where Toni Morrison would be giving her fourth of six lectures as part of the annual Charles Eliot Norton Professorship. Past Norton professors have included T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, E.E. Cummings, Czeslaw Milosz, and Nadine Gordimer. Morrison, one could argue, was the most renowned name on that list.