In the early 1970s, when he was the managing editor of Harper’s Magazine, Lewis H. Lapham began working with, and corresponding with, a young poet and essayist named Annie Dillard. For the rest of his career and hers, Lapham continued to publish Dillard at Harper’s and then at Lapham’s Quarterly. A member of the Quarterly’s editorial board, Dillard contributed to ten issues. It is no surprise to hear her voice on the topic of Nature or Water, but her tremendous curiosity encompassed the cosmos and the human wreck of time, not just weasels and creeks. She possessed that poetic gift celebrated by Emerson: “to magnify the small, micrify the great.” We find her in the Sports & Games issue, remembering her childhood love of baseball—how the red stitches on the good leather “seemed to call forth a skill both easy and precise.” We find her in the Flesh issue, remembering the hair on her father’s arms and the skin on her mother’s face, which “took impressions readily.” 

“On the opening of a book or the looking into a manuscript I listen for the sound of a voice in the first-person singular,” Lapham once wrote. “From authors I have read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence—in Gibbon’s polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla’s command of the subjunctive, in Mailer’s hyperbole and Dillard’s similes.” When Lapham died in 2024, Dillard commemorated him with one such simile, writing of her longtime friend and editor, “He spoke with his cigarette in his mouth, so he said everything behind a cloud of smoke like Moses at Sinai.” 

On the occasion of Dillard’s death on September 15, 2026, Lapham was no longer present at his desk to pen a tribute in reply, so we are sharing instead, verbatim, a letter he sent Dillard on August 30, 1974, answering one she’d written to him upon her return from an assignment he’d sent her on, to the Galápagos. The “Mr. Shnayerson” in Dillard’s letter is Robert Shnayerson, editor-in-chief of Harper’s from 1971 to 1976. “Richard” is Dillard’s first husband, whose surname she kept. By “on Linblad,” she meant the Lindblad expeditions for tourists that, beginning in 1966, explorer Lars-Eric Lindblad regularly led to Antarctica and the Galápagos. The assignment these letters discuss would result in an essay, “Innocence in the Galápagos: A Voyage to a Time Machine in the Pacific,” published in the May 1975 issue of Harper’s and later collected under a new title, “Life on the Rocks,” in Dillard’s third book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, published in 1982. 

“What shall we sing, while the fire burns down?” Dillard asks near the end of the finished essay. Her answer: “We can sing only specifics, time’s rambling tune, the places we have seen, the faces we have known.” And then, bardically, she adds: “I will sing you the Galápagos Islands, the sea lions soft on the rocks. It’s all still happening there, in real light, the cool currents upwelling, the finches falling on the wind, the shearwaters looping the waves.”