In this month’s issue of Harper’s (the Magazine, not the Bazaar), Lewis H. Lapham pens the last entry to Notebook, a column he introduced in 1984 as then-editor of the magazine. The seventy-five-year-old Lapham looks forward by looking backward:
“What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart. Acknowledgement of the fact lightens the burden of mournful prophecy currently making the rounds of the media trade fairs.”
Read the full essay at Harper’s.
