A World In Time

Remembering a timeless leader

“History is our inheritance. He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.” — Goethe

Lewis H. Lapham passed away on July 23 at the age of 89. He was editor of Harper’s Magazine for nearly three decades, first from 1976–1981 and then 1983–2006, at which time he assumed the title Editor Emeritus. In 2008, he founded Lapham’s Quarterly, which he edited until his death.

The following is a truncated version; the original may be found here.

The name Lewis H. Lapham may not be immediately familiar to the larger public, but to the world of magazines, editors, and those interested in history and literature, he was a transmuter of stories, a leader of thinking, a teacher of lessons.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child,” wrote Marcus Tullius Cicero. And in that regard, Lewis H. Lapham was in the business of child-rearing.

“We have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware of what happened yesterday. I know of no better reason to read history. Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.” — Lewis H. Lapham, 2008

He wanted to educate and inspire the civic mind as well as the intellectual mind. “Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religion,” he wrote in 2008.

A timeless (and timely) observation.

And he recognized that teaching others — in his case communicating in writing with beautiful and imaginative prose — is one of the responsibilities of leadership.

A Timeless & Timely Quarterly

Our collective historical amnesia is not a modern scourge. Indeed, early in his tenure at Harper’s, Lapham admitted “I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living.”

And so he developed Lapham’s Quarterly, which he succinctly described as “the Great Books made topical.”

I discovered it only as recently as 2019, but little did I know that this "literary narrative and philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and proclamations, as well as essays and reviews by contemporary historians" was precisely how I had thought of the Timeless & Timely newsletter.

It is almost as if we had the same muse.

A Voice in Time

Last year, I asked him to join me on the Timeless Leadership podcast, but Lapham demurred, citing his lack of expertise in the field of leadership:

“I appreciate your kind note,?but I'm not the best person to talk about?leadership. I think I sometimes know it when I see it in a football coach or baseball manager, but I have little or no idea what the word means when awarded to politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and corporate overlords. We live in a society afraid of speaking freely, adept at the art of going along to get along, content to kiss the hand and lick the boot of money.?

“I would that it were otherwise and I’m sorry that I can’t send more welcome news.”

Even a simple email from Lapham was elegant.

However, he was more modest in his self-assessment than he ought to have been. I later found this quote from him:

“Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint.”

In my estimation, he had essential skills that every good leader should have: he was widely read, could see and understand trends and draw a throughline through history to put them in perspective, he communicated exquisitely, and he had a wonderful and wry sense of humor.

Useful, Beautiful, True

In a world of bits and bytes where attention is measured in fractions of a second and imprimaturs are bestowed with thumb-swipes and emoji, and where we rely on AI to think for us, long-form content might seem to be as en vogue as high-button shoes or parachute pants.

But with Lewis Lapham, who won the National Magazine Award for exhibiting “an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity,” we are reminded that while the internet offers us content as readily available and as dubiously nutritious as fast food, our greater selves sometimes require a more substantial feast pro mente.

“It isn’t with magic that men make their immortality. They do so with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of five millennia, salvaging from the ruin of families and the death of cities what they find to be useful or beautiful or true. We have nothing else with which to build the future 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.”

Keep telling your stories. Make them useful, or beautiful, or true.

Or all three.

Ave atque vale.

There’s so much to learn,

P.S. To read the entire essay, including some of Lapham's gorgeous writing and additional resources (memorials, interviews, books), hop on over here.