On the Remarkable Legacy of Lewis Lapham
You only meet a few people in your life who, like stars, exert a pull so strong that they alter its trajectory completely. I was lucky enough to enter the orbit of the legendary editor and essayist Lewis Lapham. A week ago, I attended his memorial service. He died on July 23 in Rome at the age of eighty-nine.
Lewis came into view in 2002, my junior year of high school—a chance meeting in the library. Having completed a U.S. history exam for which I’d pulled an all-nighter, I flopped out on a soft chair next to the periodical rack to doze it off. For plausible deniability, I reached for a magazine to lay across my lap.
I hadn’t read Harper’s before, but that white cover stood out. On it, a painting of three horses paired with an essay by someone who sounded like a passionate preacher from the Second Great Awakening—a term that had been on the test—John Jeremiah Sullivan. The opening piece was titled “The Road to Babylon.” It was by Lewis H. Lapham, another name you don’t forget.
I’d never read anything like it. A wry, elegant yet savage broadside against the myriad forces then conspiring to invade Iraq—from President George W. Bush and Senator Joseph R. Biden to talking heads and editorial pages. No one escaped the writer’s scorn, and he was relentlessly funny. Except when he wasn’t. Midway through the essay was a moving retelling of the tragic story found at the heart of Thucydides: the Athenians’ doomed Sicilian Expedition of 415 BC, which precipitated the destruction of the world’s first democracy.
