Issue 240 | The Sun Magazine

December 1995

Readers Write

The End Of The Day

A west-facing window and Scotch, the Sacred Order of the Kitchen, photos of the summer solstice

By Our Readers
Sy Safransky's Notebook

December 1995

I keep imagining that someday I’ll get caught up: write those letters, read those books. What a great imagination!

By Sy Safransky
Quotations

Sunbeams

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

Jean Cocteau

The Sun Interview

Limiting The Future

An Interview With David Ehrenfeld

Our new false god is the idea that we can order the future. It’s a secular messianic view of a world in which there will be no death, no sickness, no stupidity — a world we will have totally ordered by the force of our own intellects and technology.

By Derrick Jensen
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Forgetting

On the nineteenth of April 1989, one of the huge gun turrets on the battleship Iowa blew up, killing the sailors who were manning it. Debate about responsibility for the explosion continued long afterward, but lost in the emotion of the tragedy was a curious aspect of the story.

By David Ehrenfeld
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Burying O’Ryan

I brought my shovels to the grave site and marked out a larger area. O’Ryan was a big dog, and I knew that a hole always gets smaller as you dig down.

By Wynne Busby
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The True, Original First World

We have got it backward in our conventional worldview. The world of indigenous peoples, like the Lacandones, is the real First World, because it has been here the longest; it was here first. The so-called First World of the industrialized North is first only in capital accumulation and military force.

By Ralph Metzner
Fiction

Memory’s Tailor

“My name is Alexandr Davidowich Berman,” he wrote in the space above Lenin’s vest. “My mother’s name was Sophie. She knew Hebrew and gave me my first needle; we made a suit for a doll.

By Lawrence Rudner
Fiction

So Familiar And Yet So Strange

First, there was the customer ahead of Simon in line disputing the price of a jumbo jar of sliced jalapeños. Then the senior who was low on cash and tried to pay on a credit card, invalidated three times.

By Len Messineo Jr.
Fiction

Perry

Perry was just another scrubby desert town tucked behind a minor highway — to us it was a highway; to the state it was a tired dirt road that had been paved in an election year and forgotten.

By Leslie Pietrzyk
Fiction

Crimson Tide

We’re standing in the drizzle — me and Uncle Oscar and Daddy and the chaplain and two soldiers who look like they’ve marched right out of the toy box. I half expect their feet to be welded to plastic platforms wedged into piles of sand.

By Randall Patnode