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.

Patrick Lawrence: Becoming Who We Are - April 18, 2024 - The following is an edited, amended, and condensed version of a speech I delivered in Zurich’s environs earlier this month. The occasion was sponsored by Zeit–Fragen, a twice-monthly journal that also comes out in French and English as Horizons et débats and Current Concerns....
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Could the Russians Seize Congress? - April 16, 2024 - The Russians have been coming, off and on, for seven-plus decades. While these conjured imaginings may be laughable, the consequences of a culture of Cold War fear are far from funny.  The Russians are coming — or coming back, better put. As...
Patrick Lawrence: ‘Automated Murder’: Israel’s ‘AI’ in Gaza - April 9, 2024 - “Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more, of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run. We strive...

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...