Issue 137 | The Sun Magazine

April 1987

Readers Write

Obstacles To Peace

An ex-spiritual-pest-control adherent; Portland, Oregon residents during the Chernobyl disaster; an expletive spewing six-year-old

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

Hosea Ballou

The Sun Interview

Dreams Without End

An Interview With Robert Anton Wilson

When you look at history, you find that we’ve become a lot more merciful as individuals. There’s a paradox in that governments are becoming a lot more destructive, but ordinary individuals nowadays are much more compassionate than they were even a century ago. We have developed more delicate, more ethical sensibilities.

By Sy Safransky
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Shadow

A healthy personality does not suppress the dark side, the shadow, but embraces it, redeems it, and so becomes whole.

By Brother David Steindl-Rast
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Written Word

Writing words on paper is particularly arrogant. How presumptuous to believe that words on paper can capture meaning, freeze life, hold it for even a moment.

By Richard Meisler
Fiction

Letters Unsent

Dear Frank,
You always liked it short and sweet. Here it is: Don’t sleep and sigh and move around on your cushion in the zendo. It disturbs others, and is conspicuous and self-centered.

By Adam Fisher
Fiction

Castaway

The bar is everything a bar should be. The lighting is dim and soothing, only the wooden bar and colored bottles gleam, and the bartender is a soft-spoken, soft-moving man with a golden beard.

By Pamela Altfeld Malone
Poetry

Selected Poems

Understanding, silent, they stand near. / Their patience is our shield. Beyond desire / their touch steadies us, and where fear / would make us turn they guide our feet, fire / like an emptiness burning them to love.

from “In The Keeping Of Angels”

By Cedar Koons