American author & editor (1935- )
The marvel of postmodern communications--five hundred television channels, CD-ROMS, the Internet--invites each of us to construct a preferred reality, furnished, like McNamara's theory of Vietnam, with the objects of wish and dream. The commonwealth of shared meaning divides into remote worlds of our own invention, receding from one another literally at the speed of light. We need never see or talk to anybody with whom we don't agree, and we can constitute ourselves as our own governments in perpetually virtuous exile. For every benign us, we can nominate a malignant them (ice people, femi-Nazis, FBI agents, etc.); and for every distant they, a blessed and neighboring we.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Lights, Camera, Democracy!
If it's true that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, then everything that exists -- the sun and the moon, mother and the flag, Beethoven's string quartets and da Vinci's decomposing flesh, is made of the elementary particles of nature in fervent and constant motion, colliding and combining with one another in an inexhaustibly abundant variety of form and substance. No afterlife, no divine retribution or reward, nothing other than a vast turmoil of creation and destruction. Plants and animals become the stuff of human beings, the stuff of human beings food for fish. Men die not because they are sick but because they are alive.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013
Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation's educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
preamble, Money and Class in America
The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron -- and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring -- embody the American dream of Eden.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Lapham's Quarterly, 2008
The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
About the presence of death and dying I don't remember the society in the 1950s being so skittish as it has since become. People still died at home, among relatives and friends, often in the care of a family physician. Death was still to be seen sitting in the parlor, hanging in a butcher shop, sometimes lying in the street.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Momento Mori", Lapham's Quarterly: Death, fall 2013
When I was a child, I thought the pageant of the past was still intact and traveling in space at 186,282 miles per second, aboard a science-fiction beam of light under the command of Captain Clock. Not yet having learned how to count time as money, I know the beam of light is time shaped by the force of the human imagination and the powers of its expression (in the languages of art and science but not as the commodity discounted as an abstraction), and I'm content to live temporarily suspended in as many kinds and sorts of time (historical, biological, metaphysical, and mythological) as were my pagan forebears long since descended into the glossy darkness under the turf at Stonehenge.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Captain Clock", Lapham's Quarterly: Time
Recollections of early childhood bear comparison to fairy tales, and ... youth remains an unknown country to whose bourn no traveler returns except as the agent of a foreign power.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Fortune's Child", Lapham's Quarterly: Youth
Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Them", Lapham's Quarterly: Foreigners, winter 2014
Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box -- complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place?
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
preamble, Money and Class in America
Democracy is a difficult art of government, demanding of its citizens high ratios of courage and literacy, and at the moment we lack both the necessary habits of mind and a sphere of common reference.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Lights, Camera, Democracy!
Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Waiting for the Barbarians
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America