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Lapham's Quarterly: Memory
Volume XIII, Number 1, Winter 2020. Among the Contributors: Frederick Douglass, Ibn Manzur, Michel de Montaigne, George Eliot, Rogier van der Weyden, Eva Hoffman, Konrad Lorenz, Lydia Davis, Desmond Tutu, Gerda Saunders, Winslow Homer, Gustave Flaubert, Svetlana Alexievich, Thomas Paine, Jim Holt, Virginia Morell
- GenresNonfictionEssays
219 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2019
6 people are currently reading
19 people want to read
About the author
Lewis H. Lapham
180 books134 followersLewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 19, 2020
Lapham's Quarterly never disappoints. Each issue brings something familiar, as well as something that stretches our imagination and provides seeds for further contemplation.
The Winter issue "Memory" features writings and visuals (art, artifacts, etc) spanning near current day (2017) to 500 BCE. Selections provide a pertinent read, and an often unexpected conceptual thrust.
Among my favorite quotes in this issue are the following:
- "The recorded past is a spiked cannon. The remembered past is live ammunition - not what happened two hundred or two thousand years ago, a story about what happened two hundred or two thousand years ago. The stories change with circumstance and the sight lines available to tellers of the tale. Every generation rearranges the furniture of the past to suite the comfort and convenience of it anxious present." Lewis H Lapham
- "we have learned to live in a world in which it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to a thing. In place of memory, we have machines to tell use who and how and what we are, where to go and what to do, text A for yes, B for no. Not only do we not object to our dehumanization, we regard it as a consummation devoutly to be wished - to be minted into the coin of celebrity, become a corporation, a best-selling logo or brand, an immortal product in place of mortal flesh."Lewis H Lapham
- "The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust" Elizabeth Brown (1955)
- "The more I endeavored to grasp this lost memory, the more obstinately did it elude me; a sort of jellyfish glistening in the abysses of consciousness, slippery and unseizable." Stefan Zweig (1929)
- "All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates: all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books" Richard de Bury (1345)
- "...knowledge is a treasury, and your heart its strongbox...The whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it, for just as having heard something does not profit one who cannot understand, likewise having understood is not valuable to one who either will not or cannot remember. Indeed, it was profitable to have listened only insofar as it caused us to have understood, and to have understood insofar as it was retained." Hugh of Saint-Victor (1130)
- "It is only in memory that we are the same person for others and for ourselves. At the age I am now, there is probably not a single molecule of my body that I had when born." Denis Diderot (1758)
The Winter issue "Memory" features writings and visuals (art, artifacts, etc) spanning near current day (2017) to 500 BCE. Selections provide a pertinent read, and an often unexpected conceptual thrust.
Among my favorite quotes in this issue are the following:
- "The recorded past is a spiked cannon. The remembered past is live ammunition - not what happened two hundred or two thousand years ago, a story about what happened two hundred or two thousand years ago. The stories change with circumstance and the sight lines available to tellers of the tale. Every generation rearranges the furniture of the past to suite the comfort and convenience of it anxious present." Lewis H Lapham
- "we have learned to live in a world in which it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to a thing. In place of memory, we have machines to tell use who and how and what we are, where to go and what to do, text A for yes, B for no. Not only do we not object to our dehumanization, we regard it as a consummation devoutly to be wished - to be minted into the coin of celebrity, become a corporation, a best-selling logo or brand, an immortal product in place of mortal flesh."Lewis H Lapham
- "The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust" Elizabeth Brown (1955)
- "The more I endeavored to grasp this lost memory, the more obstinately did it elude me; a sort of jellyfish glistening in the abysses of consciousness, slippery and unseizable." Stefan Zweig (1929)
- "All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates: all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books" Richard de Bury (1345)
- "...knowledge is a treasury, and your heart its strongbox...The whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it, for just as having heard something does not profit one who cannot understand, likewise having understood is not valuable to one who either will not or cannot remember. Indeed, it was profitable to have listened only insofar as it caused us to have understood, and to have understood insofar as it was retained." Hugh of Saint-Victor (1130)
- "It is only in memory that we are the same person for others and for ourselves. At the age I am now, there is probably not a single molecule of my body that I had when born." Denis Diderot (1758)
April 9, 2023
What did I think of this "book?" (Well, technically it's a magazine, but Memory clocks in at a little over 200 pages, so I'll just refer to it as a book.) I am less glad to read it than to have read it.
A number of tasteful curated excerpts about a given subject from key authors throughout history has all the essentialness of a dictionary or commonplace book. Whenever I start to muse on memory and what it means to me, I'll instantly start leafing through this volume, re-reading the excerpts which I found most enjoyable and most notable.
But the actual reading experience is a bit disorienting. The titles are not ordered chronologically nor are they ordered by style. One minute, you're reading an interview from the 1700s, the next, a work of psychoanalysis from the 1900s. One minute a poem, the next, part of a story. Constantly re-adapting, constantly re-clearing your mental palette is a lot of work.
Ergo, I am glad to have read it but I didn't like reading it.
A number of tasteful curated excerpts about a given subject from key authors throughout history has all the essentialness of a dictionary or commonplace book. Whenever I start to muse on memory and what it means to me, I'll instantly start leafing through this volume, re-reading the excerpts which I found most enjoyable and most notable.
But the actual reading experience is a bit disorienting. The titles are not ordered chronologically nor are they ordered by style. One minute, you're reading an interview from the 1700s, the next, a work of psychoanalysis from the 1900s. One minute a poem, the next, part of a story. Constantly re-adapting, constantly re-clearing your mental palette is a lot of work.
Ergo, I am glad to have read it but I didn't like reading it.
April 26, 2020
Interesting topic, well curated excerpts, and fascinating essays in this edition.
December 14, 2020
Found the theme of memory more engaging than I expected.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews