December 2023
Gratitude
A second chance at work, a shared meal in the classroom, a helpful stranger at a rest stop
20, 40, 60, 80
Middle-aged people shrink, crease, fade, and, if they’re lucky, slowly lose the desire to be noticed, the way we once lost our childhood taste for Necco Wafers or Pez. My desire to be seen is gradually being replaced by the desire to see: the faces of those I love, the cardinal in the bush, the socks of the woman with multiple sclerosis who swims at the Y.
Sunbeams
The challenge of running The Sun continues to occupy me. Sometimes it occupies me like a conquering army, sometimes like the Holy Ghost. Either way I’m grateful for the chance to do this work month after month, year after year — a man happy to have found his cross to bear. Yes, even living your dream can feel like a burden now and then. But, my oh my, to live your dream! And not just when you’re sleeping, but every morning when you open your eyes. Then you sit in the dark and write a few words. Then the sun comes up.
Sy Safransky’s Notebook, May 2006
Speak, Memory
Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia
Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?
Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.
A Letter From Sy’s Desk
In January my implausible idea of working at the magazine for fifty years will have come to pass, and I will comfortably step into a new role as editor emeritus. That having been said, it’s hard for me to say goodbye.
His Body Of Work
I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.
Deformation Catalog
I had thought nobody understood dark matter — that it was, fundamentally, an encapsulation of all we didn’t know. But it turned out other people’s lack of understanding took the form of complex theories, mathematical equations, computer programs that turned impenetrable data into different impenetrable data. Other people’s confusion was a castle you could live inside, a whole architecture of the unknown. My confusion was a wall I kept walking into.
A Thousand Words
A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
The Patron Saint Of Airport Sparrows
Now that I make the frequent arrivals / and departures of a child who grew up / and moved away from his parents, / who grow older and sicker and smaller / between visits, I feel too sad to read / while I wait for boarding to start
This Little Bit I Am Trying To Hold
Poems About Departures
Listen to the poets in this month’s special poetry section read their poems about leaving and letting go. To listen, click the play button below each title in the article.
I will leave you, / and I will / leave the sudden // darkness of afternoon thunderstorms / and I will leave / the rain and its patience in shaping mountains
— from “I Will Leave,” by Michael Bazzett
I am here to translate my father’s death / into fruit. Something that can be held. To bring / it up to your lips the way I spooned strawberry / yogurt up to his and said to him the word “Eat.” / There was no use, in the end. There was no hunger.
— from “I Did What I Could to Keep This,” by Peter Markus
Tonight, because all matter is dissolving, you & I / are being gradually undressed by the universe — // silk & wool molecules mingling with cells / rising from skin like souls
— from “Everything,” by Terry Lucas
