Roundtable

A letter from the acting editor.

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

The second-to-last time I saw Lewis Lapham in person was at an impromptu editorial meeting convened at Paul & Jimmy’s Ristorante on East 18th, his usual spot. This was April 2023. I and the Quarterly’s editors had just begun work on what was supposed to have been the fall 2023 issue, devoted to the topic of Islands. Lewis was finishing what would turn out to be his last essay, “Power Outage,” the preamble for what would have been the summer 2023 issue, Energy. At Paul & Jimmy’s, the conversation turned to future issues, of which Lewis hoped there would be a thousand more. Because the Quarterly brings the past to bear upon the ever-changing present and aims always to be timely as well as timeless, it could continue to find new ways to make the voices of the dead speak meaningfully to the living. The list of promising topics for new issues was long, possibly inexhaustible. We had done an Eros issue, one editor observed, but not Love. We had done Youth, Lewis noted, but not Childhood. Death but not Old Age. Every topic gave you “a different slice,” Lewis said, meaning a different cross-section of the historical record, different voices rescued from the wreck of time.

We all agreed that we’d love to read a Lewis Lapham essay on the topic of old age. Eighty-eight years old that spring, he walked with the assistance of a cane, his back bent into a question mark. Of old age, Socrates in the opening pages of Plato’s Republic says this: “I count conversations with very old people among my greatest pleasures*.* We ought to learn from them as from travelers on a road we have not yet taken but which most of us, sooner or later, are destined to follow.” Lewis, that April, had traveled far ahead of the rest of us along that road—was, in fact, closer to its terminus than we knew.

The last occasion on which I saw Lewis Lapham in person arrived eight months later. Once again, we gathered at Paul & Jimmy’s Ristorante, not this time for an editorial meeting—but for a farewell dinner. Lewis was leaving later that week for a retirement community in Florida, a destination he did not relish after his many years in New York City. The events preceding his departure made this valedictory dinner a somewhat gloomy affair. During the pandemic, the *Quarterly *had entered a perilous strait, caught between the Scylla of pandemic-related financial distress—no newsstand sales, no Decades Ball, high inflation—and the Charybdis of its founding editor’s failing health.

The World in Time, the podcast Lewis had been hosting since 2008, had the previous August fallen abruptly silent. The Energy issue, ready to ship to the printer since the previous June, remained on hold, as did the Islands issue, nearing completion, as did the *Quarterly’*s future.

The editorial staff, furloughed the previous October, still harbored hope that the furlough might soon end; that Lewis would yet return to his editor’s desk. He intended to. Even then, bound for Florida, he planned to edit the Quarterly from afar. The Quarterly’s staff had learned to edit remotely during the pandemic. It could be done. And earlier in his editorial career, Lewis had delivered such happy reversals of fortune. After he helped save Harper’s Magazine in 1980, a newspaper story about the rescue had appeared under the headline, “Lewis Lapham: Heart of the Phoenix.”

By the evening of his farewell dinner, his voice—that baritone full of gravitas, gravel, and humor—had gone pianissimo. It was hard to hear him over the restaurant’s chatter and din. But he was in his element, captain of a banquet table, taking in the conversations around him. He shared with the assembled crew of current and former editors that he’d begun re-reading Moby Dick. As servers were clearing our plates, I chimed my fork against a wine glass and, after some personal expressions of gratitude, shared with Lewis two favorite and pertinent passages from Melville’s novel.

The first was a long paragraph—from chapter 49, “The Hyena”—that I looked up on my phone:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gunflints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy….

While I read, Lewis listened attentively, savoring the language, chuckling at the ostrich of potent digestion.

The second quote I shared that evening was short enough that I could recite it by heart: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

Ishmael makes his distinction between the two kinds of woe—one wise, the other mad—in the middle of a dark night. Standing watch at the Pequod’s helm, hand on the ship’s “jawbone tiller,” he nods off for a moment, and when he comes to, he has lost his bearings. The ship’s compass, lit by a binnacle lamp, has vanished. “Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness,” he says. “Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.”

Gathering his wits and then his whereabouts, Ishmael realizes that while dozing off, he’d turned about so that he was now facing aft, staring out beyond the *Pequod’*s stern into the jet gloom of the Pacific. The “flashes of redness”? Reflections of the fires of the try-works, those ship-board ovens into which the Pequod’s crew had fed strips of blubber, rendering them into oil. Just in time to “prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her,” Ishmael reorients himself. “How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night,” he says.

In the manner of Father Mapple finishing a sermon, Ishmael concludes the passage and the chapter—chapter 96, “The Try-Works”—with a series of exhortations and linked analogies: “Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. Tomorrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright…” He does not end his sermon there, on this sunny note, however. He gives his linked analogies a final turn, one that reverses the clauses of the sentence that I shared in my toast to Lewis: There is a woe that is madness, yes, and that mad woe resembles an “unnatural hallucination of the night”—the gleams of firelight on the dark waves a kind of photo-negative of the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. But there is also a wisdom that is woe, a wisdom of the sort found in Ecclesiastes, which Ishmael calls “the fine hammered steel of woe.”

A “Catskill eagle,” he tells us, can “alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.” So a wise soul must do both: dive down into sorrows and soar out of them.

I did not share Ishmael’s exhortations in the toast to Lewis that I delivered two Decembers ago, but I concluded that toast with some exhortations of my own. Let us not be woeful tonight, I said. Let us instead be grateful. And we were, all of us who’d assembled that evening to see Lewis Lapham off—grateful for the magazine he’d created, for the educations we’d received, for the labors of love the *Quarterly *had made possible.

There’s a passage by the poet Frank Bidart that my mind has returned to more than once these past two years. I quoted it in the first contribution I ever made to Lapham’s Quarterly, an essay that ran in the Spring 2011 issue, Lines of Work. “There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being: the need to make,” Bidart observes in a sequence of poems devoted to the topic of making. “The culture in which we live honors specific kinds of making (shaping or misshaping a business, a family) but does not understand how central making itself is as manifestation and mirror of the self, fundamental as eating or sleeping.”

The word poetry derives from the Greek *to make, *suggesting the kind of soulful making Bidart means. Such making externalizes our inner lives, inspirits the material with the immaterial. Such making is utterly distinct from *producing. *Economists can measure the gross domestic product, but there is no measure for gross domestic poiesis.

Those of us who have contributed to the Quarterly—by writing for it or editing for it but also perhaps by donating or subscribing to it—have done so in part because Lewis Lapham always honored the kinds of making that Bidart has in mind, the kinds of making that answer a fundamental human need. Every issue was made in the way that Lewis taught the editors on his staff to make a magazine: artfully, purposefully, skillfully, playfully, taking care to hear and respect the timbre of a singular voice, bring out the grain of a singular mind. In his inaugural preamble, “The Gulf of Time,”published eighteen years ago in the first issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, States of War, he compared the Quarterly’s editorial project to carpentry. “We have nothing else with which to build the future,” he wrote, “except the lumber of the past—history exploited as natural resource and applied technology, telling us that the story painted on the old walls and printed in the old books is also our own.”

Since his death, those of us to whom Lewis entrusted his Quarterly have with a phoenix’s heart fought for its survival. We have done so in memory of Lewis, and in honor of his wishes, but most of all because we treasure the Quarterly, considering it to be the culmination of a brilliant editorial career and the consummate expression of its namesake editor’s greatest commitments, ones we share—to the timbre of the singular voice, to the study of history and literature and ideas, to the art of the essay, to the professions of editing and journalism, the freedoms of speech and of mind.

Last May, when I and veterans of the editorial staff set out to revive the Quarterly’s website and podcast, we invited to join us as our new editor-at-large Francine Prose—novelist, essayist, professor at Bard College, former president of PEN America, current member of the Quarterly’s editorial board, frequent contributor to its pages. Accepting the role, Prose issued a rallying cry that appeared last June in the New York Times. “It’s more important than ever that this magazine survives,” she said, speaking for all of us. “It acknowledges the importance of history and art and thought—all things that seem to be threatened now.”

We live in dark times, and yet for *Lapham’s Quarterly, *at least, the sources of hope and gratitude have in 2025 outnumbered the sorrows. Two Decembers ago, it was easy to imagine that the *Quarterly *was “not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern,” but last March our Executive Director and Publisher Paul Morris announced good news: as soon as it settles its pandemic debts, the *Quarterly *will be moving to the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College.

The Quarterly still has an office in New York City, one it now shares with the Hawthornden Foundation, which in 2024 generously took over the lease, but the Quarterly’s editors no longer report to headquarters. In makeshift editorial offices scattered across the continent, we have resumed the pandemic practice of working remotely.

There is an outpost of *Lapham’s Quarterly *at Clio’s Books in Oakland, California. There are editorial offices in Brooklyn, Maine, and the Hudson River Valley. There is a desktop audio engineering studio in North Carolina and a recording studio in the attic of an old house in Michigan. Here, in that attic in Michigan, battered back issues of Lapham’s Quarterly compete for shelf space and desk space and floor space with books, many of them featured on recent episodes of The World in Time, their pages dog-eared and annotated and colorfully feathered with sticky notes.

When it took over the lease on the Quarterly’s New York office, the Hawthornden Foundation offered to maintain and catalogue the library that Lewis Lapham had left behind. The library’s volumes were not collector’s items, but in their margins, Lewis had made notes, carrying on a conversation with an author, flagging passages or facts to quote in a preamble or on an episode of The World in Time. Such notes can make legible the motions of a mind. They can aggregate into a kind of fragmented autobiography of an inner life. For that reason, we gratefully accepted the Hawthornden Foundation’s generous offer.

The books I’ve accumulated over the past six months here in the attic of Michigan have already begun to feel like an archive of the year now ending. Over the past six months, working remotely, our far-flung team of editorial volunteers has produced twenty new episodes of The World in Time. The new season began with a conversation with Francine Prose—about her memoir, 1974: A Personal History—that transported listeners back to San Francisco of the Nixon era. We are ending the year with two episodes devoted to the history of music, a topic chosen in tribute to and memory of Lewis, who in “’Round Midnight,” his preamble for the Music issue, wrote, “Why else is mankind here on earth if not to dance to the music of time, make a joyful noise unto Chicago or the Lord, help out with the labors (Promethean and Pythagorean, Apollonian and Dionysian) of creation?”

The joyful noise we made this year on The World in Time included conversations with both returning guests, such as Stephen Greenblatt and Brenda Wineapple, and guests making their first visits, such as Elizabeth Kolbert, Nicholas Boggs, Daniel Mendelsohn, Justin Smith-Ruiu, and Roger Berkowitz. On the Quarterly’s website, we published an issue’s worth of new readings, among them a previously lost passage by Mark Twain that the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan had unearthed in a neglected newspaper archive. We published a new translation of the Baudelaire sonnet that Emily Allen-Hornblower read at Lewis Lapham’s memorial service last September. We published a remembrance of James Baldwin by Otto Friedrich, Lewis Lapham’s editor and mentor. We published essays by five members of the Quarterly’s illustrious editorial board—Ben Metcalf, Curtis White, Francine Prose, Brenda Wineapple, and Greil Marcus, the last of whom also joined me and the Quarterly’s art editor Timothy Don for a live conversation at Clio’s Books in Oakland last August.

We guided listeners and readers through time and space—to Homer’s Greece, Christopher Marlowe’s England, Emerson’s America. In a series of conversations with writers and historians, we went sailing through the pages of Moby Dick*, lowering several times and will lower again in the year ahead, continuing our ongoing and intermittent series on the literature and history of the sea, which Lewis Lapham loved. We considered the history of drugs, the codas of sperm whales, the politics of civil disobedience as imagined by both Arendt and Thoreau. We published seventeen new installments of The Rest Is History, our digest of new essays and journalism attuned to voices of the past, and on the new Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, we introduced a new column, Extracts, which distills back issues into a collage of images and passages. We witnessed the Scopes Trial, listened for history in Handel’s Messiah, and walked among the ruins of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. *And we commemorated the life and work of the Quarterly’s founding editor.

In October, to celebrate our new partnership with Bard, Francine Prose and I attended the annual conference of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, the *Quarterly’*s future home. Joined on stage by novelist and Lapham’s Quarterly contributor Charles Baxter, we addressed the theme of this year’s conference—“Joy: Loving the World in Dark Times”—by searching for joy amid the gloom of Moby Dick.

Since last summer’s relaunch, the audience for The World in Time has grown. We’ve received from readers and listeners letters of encouragement, as well as donations. Not long ago, here in Michigan, I had lunch with one such correspondent who told me that when he discovered Lapham’s Quarterly in 2019, he’d sent a typewritten letter of appreciation to Lewis Lapham who, as he often did, had sent a typewritten letter in reply. I found myself saying to this devoted reader: “I only wish Lewis could have seen what we have done.”

This much, approaching the terminus of old age, Lewis knew: that we intended to carry on without him, as he’d hoped; that the Quarterly had sighted a haven ahead. In 2025, readers who donated to the Quarterly or purchased back issues helped us pay down most, but not quite all, of the debts incurred during the pandemic. In 2026, we will begin securing the *Quarterly’s *future. We have already begun preparing new readings and new episodes of The World in Time, but even under Bard’s stewardship, to publish new issues, the *Quarterly *will depend, as it always has, on readers and donors. If you have contributed, on behalf of all of us at Lapham’s Quarterly, I thank you for helping us with the labors (Promethean and Pythagorean, Apollonian and Dionysian) of creation. With your continued support, a year from now, those of us to whom Lewis entrusted the Quarterly—the readers and donors as well as the contributors and editors—may be able to say, truthfully, “How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night.”