One spring afternoon in 2023, I received an unexpected phone call from Lewis Lapham, whose voice I’d been listening to since 1998, when I joined the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine. We hadn’t spoken since before the pandemic, but his podcast, The World in Time, had kept me company during lockdown, so it was with genuine delight that I said to him, “Lewis! It’s good to hear your voice,” adding, “How are you?”

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“Old,” he said. “Donovan, I’ve gotten old.”

He was calling because I’d filled in for him once, writing a preamble for the summer 2018 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Water. Now, five years later, he wanted to see if I might fill in again. The topic this time: Islands. He wanted a preamble and an issue that would consider “the mythos of islands,” he said, not just the geography and the history.

I understood the assignment and accepted it. For the next few months, the editors of Lapham’s Quarterly and I set to work, gathering   that had something to say about islands—voices like that of an anonymous Egyptian mariner, shipwrecked on an island in 2000 bc; or that of the writer John Keene, who in 2014 traveled four centuries into the past, imagining himself into the point of view of a sailor from San Domingo seeing the island of Manhattan for the first time in the year 1613, when bayberries grew thick beside the Hudson and frogs hidden in the rushes serenaded “fortresses of trees.”

We tuned in the voice of Charles Darwin, who after visiting the Galápagos scribbled in his ornithological notebook an understated note to self: “The zoology of archipelagoes will be well worth examining.” We visited the island of Rhodes with Lawrence Durrell, St. Helena with Napoleon, England’s “sceptered isle” with Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, Sakhalin Island with Anton Chekhov, Ibiza with Walter Benjamin. We listened to the voices of inmates on Rikers Island and to those of immigrants on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.

“Islands have always fascinated the human mind,” Rachel Carson told us. “Perhaps it is the instinctive response of man, the land animal, welcoming a brief intrusion of earth in the vast, overwhelming expanse of sea.”

In an essay called “Isla Incognita,” Derek Walcott formulated the animating question that guided our work on the Islands issue: “There was a phrase from a Latin text at school, Quales est natura insulae? What is the nature of the island? It has stuck in here for over thirty-five years. I do not know if I am ready to answer it.”

Lewis, meanwhile, was finishing what would turn out to be his last essay for the Quarterly, the preamble for the issue on Energy, originally scheduled to appear in the summer of 2023. We did not know then how little time he had remaining, but he knew it was running short. The future of Lapham’s Quarterly was at the forefront of his thoughts.

*

When I first learned of Lewis’ death in July 2024, I retrieved the Fall 2013 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly—Death—from my bookshelf and flipped to his preamble, “Memento Mori.” As was often his custom, he’d chosen an epigraph for his essay. This one was from Woody Allen: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” As was sometimes his custom, he begins by responding to the epigraph, as if striking up a conversation with it. “I admire the stoic fortitude,” he writes in reply to Woody Allen, “but at the age of seventy-eight I know I won’t be skipping out on the appointment, and I notice that it gets harder to remember just why it is that I’m not afraid to die.”

A decade later, approaching the grave, he feared death, I’m sure—understandably, as do I, as do most of us, especially if we can see it coming. The whole essay is worth revisiting, but I’ll just share one more passage from its closing sentences. “If my luck holds true to its so far winning form,” Lewis writes,

death will drop by uninvited and unannounced, and I’ll be taken, as was my grandfather, by surprise, maybe in the throes of trying to write a stronger sentence or play a perfect golf shot. If not, I’ll hope to show at least a semblance of the composure to which many of the authors in this issue of the Quarterly bear immortal witness. Certain only that the cause of my death is one that I can neither foresee nor forestall, I’m content, at least for the time being, to let the sleeping dog lie.

His luck did not hold true. Death announced its approach with ever-louder intimations of mortality, but Lewis did show that wished-for semblance of composure, fearing death but carrying on in the face of it, scribbling away at his editor’s desk until the doctors insisted on bedrest, and even then, while rereading Moby-Dick, for perhaps the fifth or ninth or eleventh time, he took up his pen to work on a memoir that he would not have time to complete. Nor would he have time to see into print either the Energy issue or the Islands issue.

Lewis hoped his namesake magazine would survive him. He believed it could and should survive him. We at Lapham’s Quarterly share this belief. We believe the magazine should live on because there is no magazine like it in American letters. And because, during its first fifteen years, Lapham’s Quarterly attracted a large and loyal audience of readers who made it the best-selling magazine in its class. And because donors large and small have contributed to its survival, recognizing the value of a magazine that brings history and humanistic learning into the public square. We believe Lapham’s Quarterly should live on because, to quote Marilynne Robinson, a writer Lewis was proud to have published, “This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history.”

We believe Lapham’s Quarterly should live on because, to quote Marilynne Robinson, a writer Lewis was proud to have published, “This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history.”

America has if anything grown more bewildered and bewildering in the years since Robinson first issued that diagnosis, that remedy. In 2025, when the news cycle has accelerated into a dizzying blur, when our noisy, hasty technologies of mass communication algorithmically tumble together truths and untruths, facts and fakes and AI hallucinations, the slow pace and the long view of Lapham’s Quarterly seem to us newly and urgently suited to the times.

*

Last March, when the Quarterly’s publisher and executive director, Paul Morris, first announced the good news about the home the magazine had found at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, to which it will be moving later this year, I listened to a keynote address that Lewis had delivered at the Hannah Arendt Center in 2011. Introducing him at the podium was Francine Prose, the Quarterly’s new editor-at-large. She said this of Lewis Lapham: “Not only is he a brilliant writer… he’s a dream editor, partly because of his meticulous attention to language, but also because he urges and pushes writers to think more deeply and clearly and to go further than we thought we could.”

In that keynote address, Lewis spoke about giving up his youthful dream of a career in academic history. He had the mind of a generalist, not a specialist, and so had chosen instead a career in journalism. “We’re part of the same human expedition,” he said, “that set out, lo, these many years ago from Africa.” During the journey over the “frontiers of the millennia,” our predecessors on this planet had saved what they had found to be “beautiful or useful or true,” and although much had been lost, much had been saved. “A sense of history,” he said, “gives you a sense of a broader and wider self,” which is also what editors and writers get from the conversation they carry on with “a community of readers.” He spoke of the courage that truth-seeking and truth-telling require, have always required.

Although he extemporized from notes, the address is worth listening to in its entirety—or quoting from at length:

The problems of telling the truth are: It’s not easy. It takes a great deal of courage, and I can remember that during the time when I was the editor of Harper’s Magazine, my way of trying to find the truth was to hear it in the strength and the voice of the writer. I’d begin reading and within three or four pages, if I could hear the voice of a writer trying to speak to what he or she had seen—felt, known, believed, come to know—it would be reflected in the conviction, even though it may have been against the grain of popular opinion. That to me was the truth. I could hear it in the voice and it was different than somebody trying to write an annual report or a political speech or a document with a political purpose—a seeking of grace and favor or trying to get the exam question right. I mean, here was somebody following the line of the thought or the phrase or the next sentence into who knows where. And it was this sense of willingness to take the chance, maybe be wrong.

He continued in this vein, defining liberty as “the courage that you derive from not running a con game on your own thought.” In America, he said, “we tend to believe that freedom is freedom of markets as opposed to a freedom of mind, and I think that’s making a mistake.” He referenced or quoted a small pantheon of writers and thinkers—Twain, Melville, Wharton, Bierce, Juvenal, Goethe, McLuhan, Arendt.

And he spoke about the inspiration for Lapham’s Quarterly, a topic that also warrants quotation:

There are always too many facts. There are more facts today than we know what to do with. They come so quickly 24/7 that they blow away and shred as if they were in a wind tunnel. And we lose track of who we are, where we’re from, what is our story. And this is one of the reasons, probably the major reason, that I’ve shifted from Harper’s Magazine to doing a quarterly that deals with the voices in time—that is to say, with history. I approach a topic in the news—money, war, nature, education—and then I bring to bear on it the voices of people like Thucydides or Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf or Empedocles—you know, across the last three-thousand-odd years because what makes truth survive, I think, is in the force of the imagination and the power of expression.

*

Lewis loved a phrase we hear there, “voices in time,” the title he gave to the centerpiece section of the Quarterly. Thinking about the future of the magazine, I was reminded of another phrase, from an essay that I helped translate many years ago, by the French philosopher and journalist Régis Debray. Debray recommends “reading the newspaper by the light of history books,” and that is one way to think of Lapham’s Quarterly, as a light by which to read the news, except that, as much as Lewis loved history books, Lapham’s Quarterly isn’t one, not exactly. It is, I think, an essay, a grand, polyphonic essay about time—an essay about time for many voices that Lewis began composing eighteen years ago.

Lewis had always brought an essayist’s sensibility to the art of editing. When he redesigned Harper’s in the 1980s, he invented that magazine’s Readings section, a monthly assemblage of documents and images artfully arranged into a kind of curated exhibit, or a kind of essay, one that often played subtle variations on a theme. In the Voices in Time section of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis gave us a time-traveling Readings section liberated from the foreshortened presentism of the news cycle and publishing calendar, an artfully curated exhibit that would respond to current events by bringing to bear upon them all of recorded history.

Each issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is a séance of voices from across the continents and centuries, a conversation inspirited by the cosmopolitan belief that, as the Roman playwright Terence put it, “I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me.” We encounter in the Quarterly’s pages the voices of writers, artists, scholars, scientists, thinkers, and historical figures, yes, but the magazine also makes audible more obscure voices rescued from the wreck of time. And because this was visual as well as aural music that Lewis was orchestrating, images accompany the voices.

*

On the September morning of Lewis’ memorial service in New York City, I visited the Lapham’s Quarterly offices, overlooking Union Square. During the pandemic, Lewis had not taken well to working from home. He loved spending his days in the company of editors whom he treated like the attending physicians, residents, and interns of the Lewis H. Lapham Teaching Hospital for Writers, Editors, and Journalists. There are many accomplished alumni of this school.

His office by that morning, two months after his death, had been emptied of its personalizing artifacts, those material traces of experience and spirit. The framed covers of nineteenth-century editions of Harper’s Weekly had disappeared from the walls. The bookend in the form of a bear reading a book had vacated the bookshelves along with the books. So, too, the bottle of scotch beside the globe and the pair of old typewriters on one or the other of which Lewis had once tapped out drafts of articles for the San Francisco Examiner and the Herald Tribune, magazine features for the Saturday Evening Post, and essays for Harper’s. Also gone: the coat rack from which on winter mornings he’d hang his scarf.

His grand oaken desk had been moved to another corner of the Quarterly’s offices, supplanted by one that might have been purchased at Office Depot. On its surface, in place of the reference books that Lewis had kept close at hand (Roget’s International Thesaurus, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, The Complete Dictionary of Shakespeare Quotations) were many folders of correspondence—several decades’ worth, all boxed up— destined, along with the rest of Lewis’ correspondence, for the archives at Columbia University.

In the first folder I opened I found two typewritten letters, dated August 1974, that Lewis and Annie Dillard had exchanged after he’d sent her to the Galápagos for Harper’s, an assignment that resulted in “Life on the Rocks,” one of the essays collected in Dillard’s now classic collection Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Dillard had enclosed a snapshot of herself holding and inspecting a Darwinian finch—an “adult male large-billed cactus ground finch,” to be exact. In her letter she explained that she’d been baiting finches and mockingbirds with a cupped hand of fresh water. “They can smell it thirty yards away,” she wrote. She’s wearing a black polka-dot bandanna over her sun-bleached hair and a long-sleeved russet shirt with little white birds flying across the fabric and has a canteen slung over one shoulder, and she looks as though she wishes the finch could talk. “I know too much. What shall I do with all this material?” she wrote in her letter to Lewis. “What length are we talking about—twenty pages?…I think at the moment what I’ve got is a piece about language. Not what immediately comes to mind—hence the delay. About isolation and individuation—and with these abstractions suitably cloaked in sealskin, leaping about.”

Lewis Lapham’s reply to Annie Dillard: “We can be talking about pages, depending upon what happens to the abstractions cloaked in sealskin. I like the idea of an essay about language, and I don’t object to rereading passages of Melville.” He then closes his letter with this sentence: “The finch interested me, as did your determined appraisal of it.”

I hear Lewis’ voice in that sentence, a voice full of bemusement and delight as well as gravitas and gravel. That sentence helps explain the epigrammatic reminiscence that Annie Dillard shared in the collection of tributes to Lewis that Harper’s published in the November 2024 issue: “He spoke,” Dillard wrote there, “with his cigarette in his mouth, so he said everything behind a cloud of smoke like Moses at Sinai.”

The finch interested me, as did your determined appraisal of it—that sentence also illustrates perfectly what made Lewis a brilliant editor and what made the writers he edited so grateful for his editorial guidance, issued from behind a cloud of smoke. As he wrote in his preamble to Animals, the Spring 2013 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis knew “little about animals other than what [he’d] read in children’s books or seen in Walt Disney cartoons.” He was not himself much of a nature lover, preferring life in the city to life in the woods. But he loved the grain of a singular mind, the timbre of a singular voice, and therefore took interest in what interested his writers. The finch interested him because Dillard’s prose and her “determined appraisal” of finches interested him.

His interest in the appraisals made by determined minds informed every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. A kindred interest will, we hope, inform the issues to come. For now, I want to give Lewis the last word. Here is the conclusion of the keynote address he delivered at the Hannah Arendt Center in 2011:

I want to end—just because I like the quote so much—with . This is Merlin, who is the wizard, talking to the young King Arthur: “‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlin, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting”—which is the hopeful note on which I will come, mercifully, to an end.

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Lapham’s Quarterly has just announced the formation of a newly assembled editorial collective committed to preserving and building upon Lapham’s vision. You can read more about the relaunch here. Feature photo by Joshua Simpson; adapted from the first episode of the new season of The World in Time. You can listen to the new episode of The World in Time here.