American author & editor (1935- )
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralising as earth, air, and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god ... It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
When we talk about the foreign, the question becomes one of us versus them. But in the end, is one just the opposite side of the other?
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Them", Lapham's Quarterly: Foreigners, winter 2014
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Waiting for the Barbarians
Most of the ladies and gentlemen who mourn the passing of the nation's leaders wouldn't know a leader if they saw one. If they had the bad luck to come across a leader, they would find out that he might demand something from them, and this impertinence would put an abrupt and indignant end to their wish for his return.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Leadership", Money and Class in America
The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q Score or disturb a Gallup poll, the candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. The sponsors of the event, generous to a fault but careful to remain anonymous, dress it up with the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, abundant assortments of multiflavored sound bites, and the candidates so well-contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game-show contestants, or posed as noble knights-at-arms setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by klieg light until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they were produced.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Feast of Fools", Lapham's Quarterly: Politics
At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Waiting for the Barbarians
What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Them", Lapham's Quarterly: Foreigners, winter 2014
Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Alms for Oblivion", Lapham's Quarterly: Intoxication
A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Harper's Magazine, March 1985
I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Harper's Magazine, November 2010
Youth as glimpsed by its elders is a story that comes from afar, showing itself as either lovely to look at or a torment to endure.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Fortune's Child", Lapham's Quarterly: Youth
The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
Tardiness is next to wickedness in a society relentless in its consumption of time as both a good and a service--as tweet and Instagram, film clip and sound bite, as sporting event, investment opportunity, Tinder hookup, and interest rate--its value measured not by its texture or its substance but by the speed of its delivery, a distinction apparent to Andy Warhol when he supposedly said that any painting that takes longer than five minutes to make is a bad painting.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Captain Clock", Lapham's Quarterly: Time
Let the corporations do as they please -- pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets -- and it is none of the federal government's business to interfere with the will of heaven.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Waiting for the Barbarians
Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
It is the fear of death--24/7 in every shade of hospital white and doomsday black--that sells the pharmaceutical, political, financial, film, and food product promising to make good the wish to live forever.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013
The days of my youth I remember as nearly always in need of explanation, and not as much fun as advertised in the promotions for board games and breakfast cereal.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Fortune's Child", Lapham's Quarterly: Youth
Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Waiting for the Barbarians