Issue 542 | The Sun Magazine

February 2021

Readers Write

Consequences

A hasty purchase, a starvation diet, an unwanted pregnancy

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

In The Middle

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s, / struggling for balance, juggling time.

By Barbara Crooker
Quotations

Sunbeams

In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion

The Sun Interview

Parting The Clouds

Charles Raison On New Treatments For Depression

All the data so far suggest that a single treatment, or two treatments, with psychedelics can relieve depression for an extended period, because the psychedelics cause the patient to see the world differently.

By Sarah Conover
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Something I Might Say

I read all the literature hospice brought: Give the gift of comfort and calm. Give them support, permission. Give them more than they gave you.

By Stephanie Austin
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Point

Home is 1.1 miles away, about a five-minute bike ride. I can feel the distance in my gut, like a rubber band with one end attached to my apartment and the other to my lower intestine.

By Hank Stephenson
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Rain Shadows

When you have been through something terrible, and you know deep down the outcome could have been otherwise, you develop a strange gratitude for everyday life. The smallest acts of generosity can make you cry.

By Steve Edwards
Fiction

On A Ship

He was still reading the Book of Job. The prophet Jonah tried to flee from God unto Tarshish, and Isadore Lemberger was fleeing from death unto Buenos Aires.

By Isaac Bashevis Singer
Photography

Salt Of The Earth

I was drawn to quite the opposite: curiosities, anachronisms, misfits, innocents, and angels. They quickly became my family. They gave me something my blood relatives could not, something fresh and immediate, accepting and nonjudgmental.

Text And Photographs By Ethan Hubbard
Poetry

Birthday

Ropes pulled tight at the huge plastic tarp / we tied from the house to the trees / like a sail, in case it rained. / It rained. I became fifty. Then the sun shone, / then the moon.

By Kenneth Hart
Poetry

Noses

It was never / in the news / or on Twitter / or Facebook or / Instagram / that on October / twenty-third, / two thousand / eighteen, at six-thirty PM

By Molly Bashaw