In his introductory essay for the inaugural issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis wrote (as he often had before) about his “risk-assessment model wired to the sound of the human voice.” If he read a piece without being able to hear its author speak—from whatever time, place, genre, species, leaning, or dimension—it wasn’t much of anything to him at all. To be mentored by him was to be tuned to this frequency. Which I’m grateful for, because while missing him since his passing a year ago I’ve been able to hear him any time by picking up his prose. It always answers the line. Lewis admired “voices that have survived the wreck of empires and the accidents of fortune,” and I know of no better way to honor him than to affirm that his is undoubtedly among them.
The patchwork essay below takes its brief from that initial preamble. “It is the joint venture entered into by writer and reader,” Lewis reminds us, “that produces the freedoms of mind from which a society gathers its common stores of energy and hope.” Back in 2018, on this quarterly’s tenth anniversary, I put together a collage essay, “Midwinter Hotel,” made up of sentences extracted from Voices in Time readings. Now I’m reporting back for duty, Captain. I’ve gone on a grand tour through Lewis’ work, hunting snark from his early days at the Saturday Evening Post, through his many years presiding over the Easy Chair and Notebook columns at Harper’s, and in those translucent preambles for his beloved LQ.
I was moved by his own remembrances of friends, mentors, and growing up around the San Francisco Bay (as I did a half-century after him). I smiled at his constant state of pique about capital’s fatuous venality. I wished I could discuss our disagreements just one more time while Lewis drank vodka from a wine glass and complained about having to leave the table to smoke. In short, I read, I stole, I arranged, I found energy again in the Laphamian vernacular, I glimpsed some honest hope for these anni horribiles. The result is something I could never have known how to say without him. No piece of his writing is cited more than once; none of his language has been changed.
“Here. Begin here. With the story.”1 The remark was characteristic.2 He thought that if only enough people had the courage to say what they meant, then all would be well.3 I think of him as a man forever asking questions and offering advice, opening doors and windows, peering with a lantern into mine shafts.4 “You were okay, kid,” he said.5
So it has come to pass.6 “Who could know what there is to be known?” he asked.7 The sense of human possibility expands and contracts like the beating of the human heart.8 He put the matter as plainly as it could be put.9 How is it possible to formulate believable generalizations in a universe of specializations that recede from one another literally at the speed of light?10 And for what?11
Fortunately I don’t know the answers to these questions; if I knew them, I would be bound to proclaim myself a god and return to San Francisco in search of followers, a mandala, and a storefront shrine.12 Isn’t that kind of the fun, the looking into the vast darkness ripe with wonders that will never cease?13 Atoms wandering in the abyss, then in the womb for the nine months during which a human embryo ascends through a sequence touching on over 3 billion years of evolutionary change, up from the shore of a prehistoric sea, traveling as amphibian, fish, bird, reptile, lettuce leaf, and mammal to a room with a view of the Queensboro Bridge.14 It is all the same story, all proof of the same mind, which, if I am to believe the evidence of the evolutionary record, is also my own.15 The “I am” and the “It is” are both productions of the same independent film studio.16 Don’t listen to consultants who tell you otherwise.17
Would that it were so.18 Easier said than done, the thinking for oneself.19 The problem doesn’t yield to zero-sum solution.20 Matter into mind, mind into matter, acorn into oak tree, oak tree into log, log into fire, fire into smoke and ashes.21 Homer told a story and so did Einstein; so do General Motors and Donald Duck.22 Nothing necessarily follows from anything else.23 The future comes and goes so quickly that one gets used to surprise entrances and sudden exits.24 Buy the bicycle or the truck, wrap up the handbag and the dress, take possession of the deck chair or the parrot, and you begin the world all over again.25
All of which means what?26 I offer the premise not as a rigorous statement of fact, but rather as a cautionary tale.27 Regarding myself as neither art historian nor literary critic, I escape the chore of having to discern zeitgeists and deconstruct paradigms.28
Which probably is why on passing a newsstand these days I think of funeral parlors and Tutankhamen’s tomb.29 Every morning I read in the papers that I live in what the editorial writers like to call “an era of rapid and unprecedented change.”30 Who now can make sense of the surfeit of information?31 Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.32 So also for the ship sinkings, the collapse of money markets, the onslaught of war, the loss of a world series.33 If not as a concerted effort to restrict the liberties of the American people, how else does one describe the Republican agenda now in motion in the nation’s capital?34 None of this is presented as particularly evil.35 Apparently nobody can be blamed for anything.36
What else must we learn to accept?37 Perhaps I am subsiding into the dreariness of responsible middle age; perhaps I display an unromantic willingness to compromise, to settle for less, to be satisfied with a minor advance on a remote sector of the front.38
Then again, maybe not.39 Who knows?40 Even to propose something so gauche as a generalization invites the witticisms of specialists who prefer the safety of easily identifiable markets, of technical jargon, of footnotes and polls.41
Suppose for a moment that we wish to obey the rules: What do they mean and where are they written?42
The best people: The phrase often comes up in conversation within the social, political, or literary oligarchies, but what does it mean?43
Freedom: Invariably celebrated as the supreme good and almost always confused with the license to exploit.44
Gut-wrenching decision: Newspaper term for a Democratic politician’s choice between two categories of self-interest.45
Hegemony: (meaning unknown)46
Presidential candidates: All unsatisfactory.47
Taxes: Rich people never pay any.48
Time: Meaningless.49
World’s unhappiness (the): The world's own fault.50
The vocabulary is limited but long abiding.51 What else did I expect?52
Rerun the same show often enough and in the benumbed mind of the constant viewer it serves as sedative and bedtime story.53
In the beginning was the word, and with it the powers of enchantment.54 How is it possible that nobody noticed?55 Now when I try to remember what it was like, or when people stop me and demand a reasonable explanation, I think first of the sweet madness that was as much a part of the place as the incessant squalling of the crows.56
But that was long ago and in another country, and instead of making hearts beat faster, the word liberty in America’s currently reactionary scheme of things slows the pulse and chills the blood.57 The story of Western civilization is for the most part a collection of tales told by, for, and about the ruling families whose smile was fortune and whose frown was death.58 Alas, nothing seems to do much good.59
“It's awful,” the historian said.60
“All true,” I said.61 The will toward self-annihilation is a familiar human characteristic.62 I don’t know what the less enlightened periods of history were like, but at present I can think of nothing easier than to outrage large sectors of public opinion by merely stating the obvious.63
No leaves on the trees, few birds in the sky; the spacious vistas interdicted in all directions by armed men in black uniforms—police at the perimeter barricades, police on motorcycles, police drifting overhead in helicopters.64 Temporary cessations of hostility, but no permanent closing of the moral and social divide between debtor and creditor, and no giving up on the thought that some lives matter more than others.65 The depreciation of any and all values unable to pay a loan shark’s rate of interest transforms the company of gentleman adventurers into a colony of anxious squirrels.66 I don't count myself a believer in the dystopian futures imagined in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984, but I think it would be a mistake to regard the trend of events as somehow favorable to the cause of liberty.67 Which is why in times of trouble I reach for the saving grace of the nearby Twain.68
How does it happen that American society at the moment stands on constant terror alert?69 Instead of one community, which might be described as democratic, there appear separate and distinct communities that must be described as totalitarian.70 That’s the trouble with dreams of power.71 It stimulates anxiety about a catastrophe that has yet to happen.72 Who better than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance, set the paradigm, order the preemptive strikes?73 Trump apparently has as little use for the rule of law as Oliver North or General Manuel Noriega.74
So also am I frightened by people who look down, from some sort of imaginary superior height, into the mirrors of race and class and see a face that is not their own.75 Attempting the hopeless task of conquering a peace, the Israeli army makes itself an accomplice to the murder of children.76 Their truths are absolute, their verbs invariably violent—“destroy,” “smash,” “purge,” “deny,” “punish,” “cut off,” “stomp.”77 Yes, they say, the world can be made to come to heel, to obey the commands of the enraged or frightened self.78 Jews who ask questions find themselves modified by the adjective “self-hating.”79 And yet nobody, least of all a committee of experts, can come up with the answers.80
I find this incomprehensible.81 I begin to see what the desk clerk meant about the local tendency toward melancholy.82
In the American scheme of things, why is the usurer (i.e., the financial magnates on the covers of Businessweek) thought to possess the rank of a duke and the loveliness of a child?83 Why no mumblings of atonement for the predatory nature of capitalism itself, its core values and standard operating procedures no different from those of the beasts in the field?84 Despite the never-ending wars on crime waged by the producers of Law & Order and CSI, why does the murder rate in the United States dwarf the comparative statistics in all of Western Europe and most of Asia?85 Why would any politician in his or her right mind wish to confront an informed citizenry capable of breaking down the campaign speeches into their subsets of supporting lies?86
Surely at some point the answers cease to be of interest.87 Narrative becomes montage, and as commodities acquire the property of information, the amassment of wealth follows from the naming of things rather than the making of things.88 The frontier dissolves into the lightness of air, and the world is full of holes.89 Children unfamiliar with the world in time become easy marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religions.90
A practical man presumably finds this kind of accounting wasteful and deranged.91 The more beautiful questions demand the more beautiful answers, and if we can learn to ask them, we stand a chance of steering clear of shipwreck on our jury-rigged and not so distant star.92 Who can make me see that not only the surface but also the substance of things consists of restless movement, that everything collides and dances with everything else, and that I can define myself as a sequence of coordinates plotted as infinitesimal moments on the graph of space and time?93
What fish would still swim in the oceans?94 Why not build full-scale replicas of medieval Paris and ancient Rome?95 In an abstracted voice, he said, “I always like those little things that get your attention.”96
I look forward to the exploration.97
On a not unreasonable assumption that we need all the help we can get, where else do we look for it if not in books, many of them old and out of print?98 To consult the record in books both ancient and modern is to come across every vice, virtue, motive, behavior, obsession, consequence, joy, and sorrow to be met with on the roads across the frontiers of the millennia.99 It’s hard to know how it could be otherwise.100 We have no other star to steer by, no other ship in which to sail.101 Times change, and so does the weather, but Homo sapiens in any and all climates remains steadfast in method and purpose.102 Melville sent Ahab across the world’s oceans in search of a fabulous beast, and Thoreau followed the unicorn of his conscience into the silence of the Maine woods.103 Most people have the same hopes and aspirations—work in which they can find meaning and a way in which they can express their capacity to love.104 The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories, all of them given the chance of making sense or love or money.105 A parallel or virtual reality released on waivers from the contract with death and time.106
Stupor mundi: The marvel of the world, object of awe or wonder.107
Time present: Identical with time past and time future.108
Precisely so.109 Time I understood to be a wonder that never ceased, in both the present and the past, and I was content to let it come and go where and how it pleased, to watch it boldly sail with every ship departing San Francisco Bay, see it creeping softly back concealed in fog.110 Through a window thick with cobwebs I could see two dogs playing with a rag, and I could hear, somewhere not far off, the beeping of horns and a radio playing the Blue Danube waltz.111 It was still raining, but more lightly, and I figured that if all of us were at fault for the shambles of the American enterprise, then I had as much of an obligation as everybody else to try to find the words, or the rush of words, that could be bound to the task of telling a believable story.112 To everybody’s surprise, not least my own, I did so.113
Blessed by what I took to be the smile and gift of fortune, I resolved to spend as much time as possible in the present tense, to rejoice in the wonders of the world, chase the rainbows of the spirit, indulge the pleasures of the flesh, defy the foul fiend, go and catch a falling star.114 It isn’t with magic that men make their immortality.115 I have a certain number of years left and a number of things I’ve left undone.116
The coffee has gone cold.117 Perish the thought.118 How or why does the world turn without it?119
Somehow he knew my name.120 When the telephone rings, it is always good news.121
1 “Adagio, ma non troppo,” Harper’s Magazine, August 1995↩
2 “Pilgrim’s progress,” Harper’s, December 2003↩
3 “Walter Karp (1934–1989),” Harper’s, October 1989↩
4 “In memory of John Fischer,” Harper’s, November 1978↩
5 “Let me tell you about Mae West,” Saturday Evening Post, November 1964↩
6 “Open to Inspection,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Spies, Winter 2016↩
7 “The American courtier,” Harper’s, October 1978↩
8 “The death of kings,” Harper’s, October 1979↩
9 “Curtain calls,” Harper’s, October 1999↩
10 “Letter to the reader,” Harper’s, January 1984↩
11 “A political opiate,” Harper’s, December 1989↩
12 “Lost horizon,” Harper’s, February 1979↩
13 “Homo Faber,” LQ, Discovery, Spring 2017↩
14 “Dame Fortune,” LQ, Luck, Summer 2016↩
15 “The pleasures of reading,” Harper’s, May 1975↩
16 “The Enchanted Loom,” LQ, States of Mind, Winter 2018↩
17 “Natural selection,” Harper’s, July 2007↩
18 “The case for impeachment,” Harper’s, March 2006↩
19 “Figures of speech,” Harper’s, November 2010↩
20 “Sticks and Stones,” LQ, Rivalry & Feud, Fall 2018↩
21 “Power Outage,” LQ, Energy, Winter 2024↩
22 “Hazards of new fortune,” Harpers, June 2000↩
23 “The Spanish armadillo,” Harper’s, April 1997↩
24 “The way west,” Harper’s, January 2000↩
25 “Kingdom Come,” LQ, The Future, Fall 2011↩
26 “The coming wounds of Wall Street,” Harpers, May 1971↩
27 “Psychoanalysis and longevity,” Harper’s, June 1973↩
28 “Lady in a Veil,” LQ, Arts and Letters, Spring 2010↩
29 “Dancing with the Stars,” LQ, Celebrity, Winter 2011↩
30 “Weimar revisited,” Harpers, February 1985↩
31 “Gilding the news,” Harper’s, July 1981↩
32 “Alms for Oblivion,” LQ, Intoxication, Winter 2012↩
33 “Temptation of a sacred cow,” Harper’s, August 1973↩
34 “Light in the window,” Harper’s, March 2003↩
35 “What movies try to sell us,” Harper’s, November 1971↩
36 “Going by the book,” Harper’s, November 2006↩
37 “The longing for Armageddon,” Harper’s, August 1971↩
38 “Letter to a doctrinaire friend,” Harper’s, January 1972↩
39 “Fortune’s Child,” LQ, Youth, Summer 2014↩
40 “The golden horde,” Harper’s, October 2003↩
41 “In the American grain,” Harper’s, February 1984↩
42 “In the garden of tabloid delight,” Harper’s, August 1997↩
43 “La Comédie humaine,” Harper’s, March 1978↩
44 “Hotel America,” Harper’s, July 1984↩
45 “Washington phrase book,” Harper’s, October 1993↩
46 “Received ideas,” Harper’s, July 1976↩
47 “Program notes,” Harper’s, May 1979↩
48 “Acceptable opinions,” Harper’s, December 1990↩
49 “The precarious Eden,” Harper’s, March 1973↩
50 “Revised text,” Harper’s, May 2001↩
51 “Word Order,” LQ, Communication, Spring 2012↩
52 “The boys next door,” Harper’s, July 2001↩
53 “Shock and Awe,” LQ, Disaster, Spring 2016↩
54 “Wonders Never Cease,” LQ, Magic Shows, Summer 2012↩
55 “Italian opera,” Harper’s, January 1999↩
56 “There once was a guru from Rishikesh,” SEP, May 1968↩
57 “Feast of Fools,” LQ, Politics, Fall 2012↩
58 “Hostages to Fortune,” LQ, Family, Winter 2012↩
59 “Corporate etiquette,” Harper’s, August 1987↩
60 “Elegy for a lost enemy,” Harper’s, October 1988↩
61 “Paper moons,” Harper’s, December 1986↩
62 “Fear of heights,” Harper’s, December 1976↩
63 “The art of innocence,” Harper’s, April 1976↩
64 “Democracyland,” Harper’s, March 2005↩
65 “Uncivil Liberty, LQ, Democracy, Fall 2020↩
66 “Holy Dread,” LQ, About Money, Spring 2008↩
67 “Regime change,” Harper’s, February 2003↩
68 “The Solid Nonpareil,” LQ, Comedy, Winter 2014↩
69 “Petrified Forest,” LQ, Fear, Summer 2017↩
70 “Oracles in residence,” Harper’s, October 1975↩
71 “Citizen Goetz,” Harper’s, March 1985↩
72 “Nuclear etiquette,” Harpers, May 1986↩
73 “On message,” Harper’s, October 2005↩
74 “Inspectors general,” Harper’s, July 1989↩
75 “A Perishable Commodity,” LQ, Flesh, Fall 2016↩
76 “The road to Shaaraim,” Harper’s, June 1988↩
77 “Dar al-Harb,” Harper’s, March 2004↩
78 “The armed teddy bear,” Harper’s, September 1984↩
79 “Revised text,” Harper’s, January 2004↩
80 “Descent into the Mirror,” Money and Class in America (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), 1988↩
81 “The shattered mirror,” Harper’s, August 1979↩
82 “Alaska,” Harper’s, May 1970↩
83 “Music for crows,” Harper’s, October 1985↩
84 “Doing the laundry,” Harper’s, May 2010↩
85 “Crime Scenes,” LQ, Crimes & Punishments, Spring 2009↩
86 “Playing with Fire,” LQ, Ways of Learning, Fall 2008↩
87 “R&D,” Harper’s, December 2004↩
88 “Crowd Control,” LQ, Revolutions, Spring 2014↩
89 “Annus mirabilis,” Harper’s, January 1990↩
90 “Time travel,” Harper’s, May 2007↩
91 “A tale told by Scheherazade,” Harper’s, January 1974↩
92 “Messages in a Bottle,” LQ, Book of Nature, Summer 2008↩
93 “Juggernaut of words,” Harper’s, June 1979↩
94 “The gods of the empty horizon,” Harper’s, June 1985↩
95 “Midas Touch, LQ, Food, Summer 2011↩
96 “Military theology,” Harper’s, July 1971↩
97 “Blue guitar,” Harper’s, May 2006↩
98 “New wine in old bottles,” Harper’s, February 1998↩
99 “Ignorance of things past,” Harper’s, May 2012↩
100 “Study hall,” Harper’s, September 2001↩
101 “The Remembered Past,” LQ, Memory, Winter 2020↩
102 “Paying the Piper,” LQ, Climate, Fall 2019↩
103 “Who and what is American,” Harper’s, January 1992↩
104 “The barbarian within,” Harper’s, February 1978↩
105 “Them,” LQ, Foreigners, Winter 2015↩
106 “Field of Dreams,” LQ, Sports and Games, Summer 2010↩
107 “Stupor mundi,” Harper’s, April 2000↩
108 “The language of Mammon,” Harper’s, February 1977↩
109 “Apes and butterflies,” Harper’s, May 1992↩
110 “Captain Clock,” LQ, Time, Fall 2014↩
111 “Vietnam diary,” Harper’s, May 1989↩
112 “Play on words,” Harper’s, May 1990↩
113 “Sea Change,” LQ, The Sea, Summer 2013↩
114 “Momento Mori,” LQ, Death, Fall 2013↩
115 “The Gulf of Time,” LQ, States of War, Winter 2008↩
116 Quoted in “Editor of Harper’s Magazine Will Retire,” Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, November 2005↩
117 “Entr’acte,” Harper’s, October 1995↩
118 “Wild west show,” Harper’s, September 2003↩
119 “Product Placement,” LQ, Fashion, Fall 2015↩
120 “Collateral damage, Harper’s, April 1998↩
121 “Cut and paste,” Harper’s, September 1993↩