John Schuster talks of ‘The Bridge of Love’ at OPL

By Tom Murray

(Oneida, NY) John Schuster, philosophy instructor and librarian at Morrisville State College, will visit the Oneida Public Library on Thursday March 11 at 7 p.m. to give an address on Thornton Wilder’s prize-winning novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” the subject of greater Oneida’s Big Read in March sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In his talk, titled “The Bridge of Love,” Schuster will explore the novel philosophically to discover the big questions of life and love, death and fate. He takes his lead from the novel’s closing line quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to eulogize the victims at the World Trade Center on September 11: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

The Big Read in the greater Oneida area is presented through a partnership of the Oneida Community Mansion House and the Oneida Public and Sherrill-Kenwood Free libraries to celebrate Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” and play “Our Town.”
The NEA presents the Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. Support for The Big Read is provided by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

Schuster, who has worked as a librarian at Morrisville State College for 20 years, has taught courses in philosophy, the history of jazz and research methodology. This summer he will take up a position at the Bavarian International School as the Director of the International Baccalaureate Program and the Head of Libraries.

He has appeared at the Oneida Library before in his role as the leader of the blues band Johnny Shoes and the Hook and as the technical producer of the family-literacy radio program Escapade in 2008.

The program is free and open to the public.

For more information, stop by the Oneida Library, 220 Broad St., or call 363-3050.

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John Schuster talks of ‘The Bridge of Love’ at OPL

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