Good, but never simple
Toni Morrison silenced the audience in Sanders Theatre on Thursday afternoon, not with one of her own stories, but with a tragic tale from real life. The author, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, recounted the “mindless horror” of the 2006 murder of five Amish girls in a one-room Pennsylvania schoolhouse by a gunman who then committed suicide, and the shocking reaction to the tragedy. Instead of demanding vengeance, the community comforted the killer’s widow and children. Their behavior “seemed to me at the time characteristic of genuine goodness, and so I became fascinated, even then, with the term and its definition,” Morrison said. Above all it was the community’s silence, its refusal “to be lionized, televised,” she added, “that caused me to begin to think a little bit differently about goodness as it applies to the work I do.” Morrison expanded on the theme of goodness for the...