The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels imprisoned them. This is our bleak world.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn commemorates the life and work of Annie Dillard, member of the Quarterly’s editorial board, frequent contributor to its pages, and friend for half a century of Lewis H. Lapham, who first began editing Dillard’s essays in the early 1970s. Hohn shares passages from Dillard’s work along with audio of remarks, delivered in the year 2000 on the 150th anniversary of Harper’s Magazine, in which Dillard explained how she came to write for Lapham and why she kept writing for him. Hohn also shares a pair of letters that Dillard and Lapham exchanged in August 1974, following her return from the Galápagos.

The episode doubles as the prologue to a new series of conversations that we are calling A Broken World, the title for which comes from a new book by Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. As introduction to the series, this episode concludes with the unabridged audio of the keynote address that Lewis Lapham delivered at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2011.

Further Reading
“Dear Lewis, Dear Annie,” Lapham’s Quarterly website, September 17, 2026.
“Voices: Annie Dillard, In Memoriam,” Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, September 23, 2026.

Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here.

Photo credit: Bowels of the Earth – Water, by Naoko Fukumaru, 2020. Earthenware, urushi lacquer, resin, and 23.5K gold. Kintsugi transformation. 12 cm. © Naoko Fukumaru. Courtesy of the artist.

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As a companion to last week’s episode of The World in Time, we are sharing with listeners the first episode of Passages: On Morrison, a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page.
Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morrison’s analysis of the whiteness of the whale is a richer Melville.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and literary critic Namwali Serpell about her new book, On Morrison, in which Serpell takes readers on a guided, chronological tour of Toni Morrison’s fiction and criticism. The conversation touches on Morrison’s literary modernism; her surprising affinities with Vladimir Nabokov; her water imagery; her enchanting way with metaphor; her transformation of historical materials; her religious faith; her study of Greek tragedy and African literature; her participation in “the canon wars”; her ardent commitment to the freedoms conferred by the First Amendment, and her equally ardent opposition to what—in her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, published in the Means of Communication issue of Lapham’s Quarterly—Morrison called “dead language”: language that “thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential,” and “cannot form or tolerate new ideas.”

The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with an epilogue about Morrison’s Paradise, the final novel in the trilogy—Morrison’s Divine Comedy—that begins with Beloved.

Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To subscribe to our new digital archive, visit the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack. To make a gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This bonus episode of The World in Time brings together a pair of conversations, one about the making of a movie, another about the making of an archive. Director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros talk to acting editor Donovan Hohn about their collaboration with Lewis Lapham on his 2005 "dramatic documentary musical," The American Ruling Class, now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Then writer and technologist Paul Ford, architect of the Harper's Magazine digital archive and co-founder of Aboard, a software consultancy, joins Hohn for a conversation about the new Lapham's Quarterly digital archive, whether technologists can move fast without breaking things, the gold rush origins of Silicon Valley, what Lewis Lapham would have made of our new Gilded Age, the magnificence of George Eliot's Middlemarch, and much else.

Further Reading
Paul Ford. “What Is Code?”, Bloomberg Businessweek, June 11, 2015.
Paul Ford. “My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes,” Wired Magazine, June 15, 2023.
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“Before he was twenty, George Washington had bought and sold and parlayed himself into nearly three thousand acres of prime land,” William Hogeland writes in Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion That Opened the West. “If he could amass enough land this way, he might build plantations, grow tobacco, marry well, become a burgess, join the Ohio Company, maybe even buy an officer’s commission in the British army. … Prospects were lengthening, and the view lay westward.”

This third installment of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, brings together a pair of conversations about the westward and eastward beginnings of American empire. The episode begins with a conversation between Lewis Lapham and William Hogeland about the conquest of the Ohio River Valley. Then, Lapham sails the Atlantic with Eric Jay Dolin, author of Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution.

The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with a reading of “The Battle at Fort Necessity: The Battle at Fort Necessity: How a Young George Washington, Fortune-Seeking in the Ohio Country, Helped Start the Seven Years’ War,” an excerpt from Hogeland’s Autumn of the Black Snake, performed by the author.
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