S. K. RileyHistory...
The past living in the present
and the present living in the past
‘[Arthur] Schlesinger wrote an essay for the New York Times a few weeks before he died in 2007 at the age of eighty-nine, entitled “Folly’s Antidote.” And that was his idea of history. It’s what saves us, the knowledge and sense of history, what saves us from the delusions of omniscience and omnipotence, from misplaced faith in money and machines. The internet works against historical consciousness because the new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that it buries all thought of what happened yesterday or the day before in an avalanche of data. [...]
The more data we possess, the less we know what it means. Yes, Alexa and Watson can access the Library of Congress, but they can’t read the books.’
- Lewis Lapham (January 8, 1935 – July 23, 2024)
The Art of Editing No. 4
Interviewed by Jim Holt, ‘The Paris Review’
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7423/the-art-of-editing-no-4-lewis-lapham
#Books #LewisLapham #History #Literature #HistoricalConsciousness
The Art of Editing No. 4
Photo by Matthew Septimus, courtesy of Harper's Magazine.It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other; think of Michelangelo as a poet, of Michael Jordan as a baseball player. This is a trap that Lewis Lapham has largely avoided. Fo...