Beginner’s Mind

My wife and I are both conservatives and have read The Sun for twenty years. We also read The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Vanity Fair in an attempt to understand and possibly appreciate the opposition. Since conservatism is anathema in those magazines and yours, reading them requires a thick skin. But we subscribe because we support your effort: a literary magazine that shuns advertising and exists by virtue of its readers and patrons.

That being said, we laughed when we read in the interview with Sy Safransky that he doesn’t want “left-wing sanctimoniousness or right-wing duplicity” in The Sun. The magazine is packed with the former and devoid of the latter. And why is the Left merely sanctimonious while the Right is duplicitous? Would Safransky never consider the Left duplicitous? Does he believe the Right is not capable of sanctimony?

If Safransky does indeed want to bring people together, maybe he should take a hit of acid and read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, and Charles Krauthammer’s Things That Matter. It will not be a bad trip.

I’m sixty years old and a mother of four, and I have been subscribing to The Sun for more than thirty years. I appreciated Sy Safransky’s candor about his use of LSD as a spiritual sacrament. I’m sure there are thousands of us who have experienced the same awakening.

Thank you for reminding us that we are all connected, and for having the guts to say how many of us discovered it.

Though I became a physician, not an editor, I was struck by how similar Sy Safransky’s path has been to my own. I, too, backpacked through Europe in the sixties, was transformed by a psychedelic experience, opposed almost all the policies of “my” government, and suffered through (and made others suffer through) a failed marriage and failed relationships.

Seventeen years ago I married my wife, Natalie, also an avid Sun reader, and we got busy trying to raise a family. This past spring Natalie and I were marveling at how blessed our lives seemed to be. We had good health, good friends, rewarding jobs, financial security, and loving teenage kids. Then, on May 9, 2013, everything changed. Our sixteen-year-old daughter, Noel, who had just graduated from high school two years early with honors and had earned a full college scholarship, didn’t make it home from a friend’s house. I went out looking for her and found she’d perished in a car accident. No other driver was involved.

We are still thankful for the many blessings that, to use Safransky’s words, have been showered on us. Years ago I decided to spend my life trying to ease human suffering. Now I have a deeper understanding of that suffering. When a drone that I helped pay for with my taxes takes out a wedding party in Yemen by mistake, I have an idea of the horror and grief experienced by the survivors. I know that, for me, the pain of the loss doesn’t go away. It just becomes tolerable.

I love Sy Safransky’s take on the meaning of the word God, on the nature of the Divinity, on LSD, and on everything else. I was especially fascinated by this statement: “When I was a kid, I was taught in Hebrew school that it was a sin to speak or write the Hebrew name for ‘God.’ ”

I expect he is referring to the ineffable four-letter name of God for which the vowelization has been lost. In the absence of vowels, it’s impossible to know just how to pronounce the name, and some consider that reason enough to avoid pronouncing it altogether. But a sin to speak or write it? I think not.

Perhaps Safransky’s teachers took the third commandment, which some Jewish sages translate as “Don’t take the name of your God in a vain oath,” to mean that we should avoid saying or even writing the word in English, substituting instead “G-d.” I have heard the commandment better explained like this: “Don’t use the name of God in a way that is hurtful to another.”