Gamma Senmin, Soga Shōhaku (1730-1783). Freer Collection, Washington.
PATRICKLAWRENCE.US serves several purposes. As an archive of the columns, commentary, and essays, it makes this work available in one place for the first time. The site also introduces my books and provides readers or those with professional queries several ways to connect. You can help sustain the work via Patreon. This is also home to an occasional journal, Cú Chulainn.
“These are my footsteps.”
——Sam Francis
Featured.
Beyond a Failed Narrative - December 17, 2022 - Americans are living a failed national narrative. Our almost universal belief in our exceptional status as a providentially “chosen people” suspends us in a beguiling myth beyond the reality of history. On September 11, 2001, we reacted with an almost...Recent work.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Blinded to Syria - December 15, 2024 - I do not know anyone who was not shocked by the lightning speed with which Damascus fell to expensively armed jihadist militias last weekend. I know very few people who do not understand that another domino has just fallen in the...
Patrick Lawrence: The Centrists Cannot Hold - December 12, 2024 - “Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” Alot of us are familiar with these lines from Yeats’s thoroughly anthologized and...
“Art Theft.” - December 10, 2024 - Stealing the future of Palestine. RAMALLAH, 6 DECEMBER—I met Saed in Aida refugee camp in the first week in November when he gave me a tour of the crowded community in which he grew up. A young man still in...Cú Chulainn.
Cú Chulainn stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
——Yeats, Cú Chulainn’s Fight with the Sea,
1892
