A Thousand Elephants

This is The Sun’s thirty-third anniversary issue. How grateful I am that this improbable dream continues; that my ardor for the work is undiminished. I’m married to The Sun, I expect, till death do us part.

Thirty-three has never been just another number to me. Jesus was said to have been thirty-three years old when he was crucified, and I’m a Jew who sometimes prays to Jesus. For numerologists thirty-three symbolizes a high level of spiritual development, and the number also makes an appearance in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and numerous other religions. There are even — you guessed it — thirty-three principal religions in the world today, according to Mircea Eliade’s The Concise Guide to World Religions. As a kid, I listened to music on vinyl LPs that played at 33⅓ revolutions per minute, and sometimes I’d become mesmerized by a record spinning round and round — the closest I got, in those days, to an altered state of consciousness.

I learned recently that thirty-three is also the number of innings played in the longest baseball game in history, a 1981 minor-league game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings. The game went on for more than eight hours, and there were only seventeen fans left in the stands when, shortly after 4 A.M., someone finally had the good sense to say, Enough.

When I started The Sun in 1974, the longest war in U.S. history — in which fifty-eight thousand Americans and more than 3 million Vietnamese were killed — had just ended. President Richard M. Nixon, facing impeachment because of the Watergate scandal, resigned in disgrace that year. (Hint, hint, George W.). Feminists picketed the New York Times to protest the paper’s refusal to use the designation “Ms.” All in the Family was the highest-rated show on television. Drivers waited on long lines to buy gasoline because of an oil embargo. It was a lot less expensive to buy a cup of coffee or a baseball team or the White House. For a million dollars, according to conventional wisdom, you could start a magazine.

I was about a million dollars short, but what I lacked in money, I made up for in determination. It was both an act of faith and an example of hopeless naiveté to start a magazine with no office, no staff, no money, and no business plan. But I believed that if my intention was pure enough, and if I worked hard enough, the universe would take care of the rest.

Becoming a successful publisher wasn’t my goal back then. In fact, I was suspicious of success and scornful of people to whom money seemed to matter more than, say, falling in love, or reading a great book. To be obsessed, during one’s brief and mysterious existence on this earth, with accumulating wealth made as little sense to me as building a dream house at the beach with no windows facing the sea.

Eventually, I met some successful men and women who’d read just as many great books as I had and whose love affairs were no less passionate (or loving). Also, after more than a decade of tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, The Sun began to grow — from fewer than a thousand subscribers to nearly seventy thousand today. Since I was still the same person — my values intact, my ardor for social justice unchanged — I realized that my opinions about success needed to be tempered. What could I really know about another person from the size of his or her bank account? Other people’s success wasn’t the problem; my self-righteous judgments about success were the problem.

In 1974 I wrote on a manual typewriter; today I write on a computer. Getting the words right is still difficult. In 1974 I didn’t know what I was doing; today I still sometimes don’t, but I’m more practiced at not-knowing: an expert, you might say. So I raise a glass to faith, and I raise a glass to hopeless naiveté, and I raise a glass to the artist Henri Matisse, who said, “You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love within the lover.”

I’m grateful for The Sun’s modest success. But I felt grateful, too, when I typed up the first issue in the middle of winter in a friend’s unheated garage. I felt grateful when I stood on the street selling The Sun, hoping to make enough to cover the check I’d just written to the printer. I felt grateful when I had to live in the back of the office because I couldn’t afford a place of my own. I felt grateful that, no matter how many bills went unpaid, we never ran out of coffee.

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