Sy Safransky | The Sun Magazine #10

Sy Safransky

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Sy Safransky is founder and editor of The Sun. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

— From December 2023
Sy Safransky's Notebook

October 2002

When Norna mentioned to our neighbor Manny that we’d be going away soon to celebrate our nineteenth wedding anniversary, Manny, who’s been married fifty-two years, said, “It’s a good start.”

October 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

September 2002

My feelings change like the changing seasons. The trees will be bare soon and the darkness will call to me again. Miklós Radnóti: “Sometimes a year looks back and howls, / then drops to its knees. / Autumn is too much for me.”

September 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

August 2002

I get up early. I wait for the light. I still trust the dawn more than I trust religion, more than I trust philosophy. Every morning the darkness disappears; morning never lets me down.

August 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

July 2002

Three thousand people were killed when the World Trade Center was attacked; to read aloud a list of their names would take two hours. Six million people were killed when the Nazis attacked European Jewry, reducing it, too, to rubble; to read aloud a list of those names would take six months.

July 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

May 2002

As long as I’m still trying to curry favor — with my dead father, with my admiring readers — I’m not writing from the heart, not really. What a busy little gardener I’ve become, pruning these sentences with such care, clippers always at the ready, clip clip. But beyond the rose garden is the meadow and beyond the meadow is the forest and deep inside the forest is the river and the river runs to the sea. I can’t get to the sea by working on my roses, by making them picture perfect.

May 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

April 2002

I’m a year older than President Bush. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t seem like much of a father figure to me. Or maybe he’s as much of a father figure as this foolish nation deserves. Nearly everyone is behind him now.

April 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

March 2002

Is it possible to live each day knowing that everything will go wrong — that everything is falling apart right now — yet remembering, too, that this in no way denies the living truth, the love at the heart of existence?

March 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

February 2002

I don’t have an American flag on my car or my front door. But I’m more of a patriot than Attorney General John Ashcroft, who studies the U.S. constitution as if it were a menu in a fashionable Washington, D.C., restaurant from which he’s free to pick and choose.

February 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

January 2002

War: Such an easy word to utter. One syllable. It slices the air like a sword.

January 2002
Sy Safransky's Notebook

December 2001

What shall I pray for now? The triumph of good over evil? A better year for American business? Shall I pray to have more faith in George W. Bush than I did when he stole the election? I don’t want to be fighting a war against terrorism. I want everything to be the way it was before. Give me back the War on Poverty. Hell, give me back the War on Drugs.

December 2001
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