Issue 487 | The Sun Magazine

July 2016

Readers Write

High School

A caring teacher, a forbidden love, a missed period

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

excerpted from
We’ve Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy — And The World’s Getting Worse

Hillman: I would rather define self as the interiorization of community. And if you make that little move, then you’re going to feel very different about things. If the self were defined as the interiorization of community, then the boundaries between me and another would be much less sure.

By James Hillman & Michael Ventura
Quotations

Sunbeams

I am troubled by my shapeless fears. My God, these anxieties! Who can live in the modern world without catching his share of them?

Vincent van Gogh

The Sun Interview

Who Are You Calling Crazy?

Gary Greenberg On How We Define Mental Illness — And How It Defines Us

Mental illness is a function of consciousness, and consciousness is something we see through a glass darkly. We simply are not prepared to understand it with the same certainty that we are prepared to understand, say, liver disease.

By Zander Sherman
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Chemo And Me

I’m convinced the most accurate way to gauge your survival odds when you have cancer is not by the size, type, or grade of the tumor but by the size and splendor of the tropical-fish tank in your doctor’s waiting room. If it’s over thirty gallons and stocked with anything neon, you’d better start wondering why they want you so calm.

By E.C. Salibian
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Dirt Monkey

My earliest Zen teachers were failure and my father, in that order. The first thing I failed at was being physically big. This wasn’t my fault, of course, but kids always feel directly responsible for how they look. And how I looked was small.

By Shozan Jack Haubner
Fiction

They Were

He was. She was. They met and together they: drank martinis, consummated their love on a couch he’d purchased at a secondhand store, bought a bungalow, wed at the courthouse with their parents’ blessing,  . . .

By Peter Witte
Fiction

The Unified Conspiracy Theory

I had been coming to the Nite Owl almost every day, because it was the only place I could get my research done. It was nice of my sister to put me up in her apartment and everything, but living with her was making it difficult to continue looking for the Pattern, because her television didn’t work. I’d tried the electronics store, but they’d gotten wise to me real quick. The only place I could watch free cable TV for as long as I wanted was that diner where pretty much no one ever came.

By Matthew Meade
Poetry

Something

The minute the doctor says colon cancer / you hardly hear anything else. / He says other things, something / about something.

By James Valvis