In his introductory essay for the inaugural issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis wrote (as he often had before) about his “risk-assessment model wired to the sound of the human voice.” If he read a piece without being able to hear its author speak—from whatever time, place, genre, species, leaning, or dimension—it wasn’t much of anything to him at all. To be mentored by him was to be tuned to this frequency. Which I’m grateful for, because while missing him since his passing a year ago I’ve been able to hear him any time by picking up his prose. It always answers the line. Lewis admired “voices that have survived the wreck of empires and the accidents of fortune,” and I know of no better way to honor him than to affirm that his is undoubtedly among them.
The patchwork essay below takes its brief from that initial preamble. “It is the joint venture entered into by writer and reader,” Lewis reminds us, “that produces the freedoms of mind from which a society gathers its common stores of energy and hope.” Back in 2018, on this quarterly’s tenth anniversary, I put together a collage essay, “Midwinter Hotel,” made up of sentences extracted from Voices in Time readings. Now I’m reporting back for duty, Captain. I’ve gone on a grand tour through Lewis’ work, hunting snark from his early days at the Saturday Evening Post, through his many years presiding over the Easy Chair and Notebook columns at Harper’s, and in those translucent preambles for his beloved LQ.
I was moved by his own remembrances of friends, mentors, and growing up around the San Francisco Bay (as I did a half-century after him). I smiled at his constant state of pique about capital’s fatuous venality. I wished I could discuss our disagreements just one more time while Lewis drank vodka from a wine glass and complained about having to leave the table to smoke. In short, I read, I stole, I arranged, I found energy again in the Laphamian vernacular, I glimpsed some honest hope for these anni horribiles. The result is something I could never have known how to say without him. No piece of his writing is cited more than once; none of his language has been changed.
“Here. Begin here. With the story.”1 The remark was characteristic.2 He thought that if only enough people had the courage to say what they meant, then all would be well.3 I think of him as a man forever asking questions and offering advice, opening doors and windows, peering with a lantern into mine shafts.4 “You were okay, kid,” he said.5
So it has come to pass.6 “Who could know what there is to be known?” he asked.7 The sense of human possibility expands and contracts like the beating of the human heart.8 He put the matter as plainly as it could be put.9 How is it possible to formulate believable generalizations in a universe of specializations that recede from one another literally at the speed of light?10 And for what?11
Fortunately I don’t know the answers to these questions; if I knew them, I would be bound to proclaim myself a god and return to San Francisco in search of followers, a mandala, and a storefront shrine.12 Isn’t that kind of the fun, the looking into the vast darkness ripe with wonders that will never cease?13 Atoms wandering in the abyss, then in the womb for the nine months during which a human embryo ascends through a sequence touching on over 3 billion years of evolutionary change, up from the shore of a prehistoric sea, traveling as amphibian, fish, bird, reptile, lettuce leaf, and mammal to a room with a view of the Queensboro Bridge.14 It is all the same story, all proof of the same mind, which, if I am to believe the evidence of the evolutionary record, is also my own.15 The “I am” and the “It is” are both productions of the same independent film studio.16 Don’t listen to consultants who tell you otherwise.17
Would that it were so.18 Easier said than done, the thinking for oneself.19 The problem doesn’t yield to zero-sum solution.20 Matter into mind, mind into matter, acorn into oak tree, oak tree into log, log into fire, fire into smoke and ashes.21 Homer told a story and so did Einstein; so do General Motors and Donald Duck.22 Nothing necessarily follows from anything else.23 The future comes and goes so quickly that one gets used to surprise entrances and sudden exits.24 Buy the bicycle or the truck, wrap up the handbag and the dress, take possession of the deck chair or the parrot, and you begin the world all over again.25
All of which means what?26 I offer the premise not as a rigorous statement of fact, but rather as a cautionary tale.27 Regarding myself as neither art historian nor literary critic, I escape the chore of having to discern zeitgeists and deconstruct paradigms.28
Which probably is why on passing a newsstand these days I think of funeral parlors and Tutankhamen’s tomb.29 Every morning I read in the papers that I live in what the editorial writers like to call “an era of rapid and unprecedented change.”30 Who now can make sense of the surfeit of information?31 Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.32 So also for the ship sinkings, the collapse of money markets, the onslaught of war, the loss of a world series.33 If not as a concerted effort to restrict the liberties of the American people, how else does one describe the Republican agenda now in motion in the nation’s capital?34 None of this is presented as particularly evil.35 Apparently nobody can be blamed for anything.36
What else must we learn to accept?37 Perhaps I am subsiding into the dreariness of responsible middle age; perhaps I display an unromantic willingness to compromise, to settle for less, to be satisfied with a minor advance on a remote sector of the front.38
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