Gamma Senmin, Soga Shōhaku (1730-1783). Freer Collection, Washington.

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.

“The crisis of our time.” - January 5, 2025 - On my return from Palestine. I recently returned from the West Bank, where I spent six weeks traveling in the governorates of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. It was my second trip there this year—the first was in April and May....
Patrick Lawrence: Our World of Wars, Our War of Worlds - December 31, 2024 - It is some years now since a lot of people began imagining the specter of World War III in the near or middle distance. This kind of thinking has been especially common since the U.S., with determination and purpose, provoked...
PATRICK LAWRENCE: American-Century Flight - December 31, 2024 - “American history is the history of the counterrevolution” — a discussion with author Joel Whitney about his latest book, Flights: Radicals on the Run. I have long nursed a keen interest in the Cold War’s corruptions on the cultural side — who...

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

Journal Entry #53 - September 23, 2020 - Four elegies. FOR A LONG TIME we made a group I took to calling “the scrum.” We were like-minded souls, ever supportive of one another, ever encouraging. We were all writers. The scrum was a sort of anchor in my...
Journal Entry #52 - January 8, 2020 - Our fingers all in knots. NORFOLK, CONN., JAN. 7— Cú Chulainn did not anticipate writing this year-opening Journal entry as America provokes—and exacerbates at every turn—a frightening and wholly manufactured crisis with Iraq and the Islamic Republic. Not one week...