Journey through the past

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My vote for most idiosyncratic new literary journal is Lapham’s Quarterly, the first issue of which is newly out. The brainchild of former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Lapham’s Quarterly bills itself as ‘[t]he journal that enlists the counsel of the dead’; its debut issue features contributions from, among others, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, George Orwell, Homer and Mark Twain.

Orwell, Homer and Twain? If you’re wondering what they’re doing here, you’re not alone. But the point, Lapham suggests in an editor’s preamble, is that we ignore such voices at our own peril, that they have much to tell us and we ought to listen.

‘It isn’t with magic that men make their immortality,’ Lapham writes. ‘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.’

He continues:

‘To bring at least some of the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present, Lapham’s Quarterly chooses a topic prominent in the news and, within the perimeter of that topic, assembles a set of relevant texts--literary narrative and philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and proclamations, as well as essays and reviews by contemporary historians.... Some stories are more complicated or more beautiful than others. Some stories are immortal, others incoherent. Homer told a story, and so did Albert Einstein; so do Jay Leno and Donald Duck. The stories that bear a second reading are true in the sense that the voice of the author emerges from the struggle to get at the truth of what he or she thinks, has seen, remembers, can find language to express. I know of no task more difficult, but it is the joint venture entered into by writer and reader--the writer’s labor turned to the wheel of the reader’s imagination--that produces the freedoms of mind from which a society gathers its common stores of energy and hope.’

David L. Ulin