Okay, having now metabolized this, I offer this --
In 1968, Lewis Lapham, then field reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, was the only Western journalist allowed inside the ashram during the Beatles now-iconic trip to India — one of the most influential and significant meetings of East and West in western mainstream culture.
Here’s the closing passage from his book With the Beatles, marking his departure from the ashram —
“Nearly 40 years later I still can bring the scene vividly to mind, as if it were the long and final camera shot in a fairy tale movie about fantastic elves and minstrels sailing up to the sun until they find the sea of green, and there, at least for a while, live beneath the waves in their yellow submarine.
The scene retains its force because I now know that it occurs at almost the precise moment, late February 1968, at which the flood tide of generous thought and optimistic feeling that formed the promise of the 1960's turns on the ebb. toward the assassination of Martin Luther King in April, followed by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June, in July by the riots engulfing the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Another twenty months and the Beatles were no longer together as a band, President Richard M. Nixon was in the White House with his "madman theory" of geopolitics, and cocaine was outselling marijuana on the markets in transcendence. Travel arrangements for magical mystery tours were being handled by the U.S Army, which over the next six years sent another 35,000 young men to die in Vietnam. By 1972 most of the flowers had wilted, and the psychedelic colors were fading silently to black.
But the Beatles had come down from the mountain with the thirty songs recorded on the White Album, among them "Dear Prudence," "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "Revolution No. 9," and in some of the chord changes I can hear the echoes of the Maharishi's laughter and Papageno's flute suspended at a stop in time.
More than once I mentioned the effect to [Post editor] Otto Friedrich before he died in 1995. "Bliss consciousness, " he said. "The view through the window of eternity."
That Gore Vidal line is both hilarious and true af. Hope he’s up there laughing with the angels.
Of course Gore would dismiss heterosexuality as merely "a lack of carnal imagination"
Tru dat. (I respond thusly because Gore would HATE that expression).
I gobbled up Harper's when Lapham was editor. I'm glad you got to meet one of the last giants in magazines.
So glad I found this essay. Lewis Lapham was my spirit animal, both in writing and bourbon consumption, and an inspiration for Timeless & Timely.
Who knew former classics majors could have so much fun?
In a world lit by fire and good Falernian, fun is what life was about. Glad you enjoyed.
Okay, having now metabolized this, I offer this --
In 1968, Lewis Lapham, then field reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, was the only Western journalist allowed inside the ashram during the Beatles now-iconic trip to India — one of the most influential and significant meetings of East and West in western mainstream culture.
Here’s the closing passage from his book With the Beatles, marking his departure from the ashram —
“Nearly 40 years later I still can bring the scene vividly to mind, as if it were the long and final camera shot in a fairy tale movie about fantastic elves and minstrels sailing up to the sun until they find the sea of green, and there, at least for a while, live beneath the waves in their yellow submarine.
The scene retains its force because I now know that it occurs at almost the precise moment, late February 1968, at which the flood tide of generous thought and optimistic feeling that formed the promise of the 1960's turns on the ebb. toward the assassination of Martin Luther King in April, followed by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June, in July by the riots engulfing the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Another twenty months and the Beatles were no longer together as a band, President Richard M. Nixon was in the White House with his "madman theory" of geopolitics, and cocaine was outselling marijuana on the markets in transcendence. Travel arrangements for magical mystery tours were being handled by the U.S Army, which over the next six years sent another 35,000 young men to die in Vietnam. By 1972 most of the flowers had wilted, and the psychedelic colors were fading silently to black.
But the Beatles had come down from the mountain with the thirty songs recorded on the White Album, among them "Dear Prudence," "Back in the U.S.S.R." and "Revolution No. 9," and in some of the chord changes I can hear the echoes of the Maharishi's laughter and Papageno's flute suspended at a stop in time.
More than once I mentioned the effect to [Post editor] Otto Friedrich before he died in 1995. "Bliss consciousness, " he said. "The view through the window of eternity."
— Lewis Lapham, “With the Beatles”