Issue 192 | The Sun Magazine

November 1991

Readers Write

Homecoming

A tiny duckling, a bullethole in the ceiling, chocolate chip cookies and bomb craters

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought it or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

Daniel Berrigan

The Sun Interview

Bad Magic: The Failure Of Technology

An Interview With Jerry Mander

In this culture, we have science and technology as religion. We no longer have a religious or philosophical basis for making choices regarding the evolution of technology. All those decisions are made in the corporate world.

By Catherine Ingram
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

TV Guide

I took a job in an area lacking electricity. Our daughters were two and four when we moved, and had had almost no contact with television. We lived for the next nine years without television.

By Jon Remmerde
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Seduction Of Consciousness

We don’t have a “drug” problem. We have never had a “drug” problem. We will not have a “virtual reality” problem. Past, present, and future, we have a consciousness problem — today compounded by the fact that it happens to be occurring in a Neanderthal political landscape.

By Travis Charbeneau
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My Machines

There is a man I talk to in the Astor Place subway stop. He lives there, and he’s missing a tooth. Today his hair was wound around sticks.

By Sparrow
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Profit And Loss: Selling The Family Home

When you have grown from infancy to adulthood in one home. . . . The shape of the rooms becomes indistinguishable from the shape of one’s consciousness. I’m thirty-four years old, and that house and land are still the setting for half my dreams each night.

By Betsy Sharp
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Russia, My Heart

Russia, once the poor turned to you, but you betrayed them. You told them how hard it was. You went on vacation and said help would arrive on the next train. In the bitter cold, they waited at the station, while their children starved, and still they waited.

By Sy Safransky
Fiction

A Body Of Sound And Light

What is in a body? We see flesh with blood going through, but who knows what it is? I never asked before. All my life I saw a body as just a body, this bit of flesh we’re put inside the day we come alive.

By Jim Janko
Fiction

Home Free

He’s functional now, of course, a basically normal guy. That’s what gets me — I look at him and marvel at what a ground of pure craziness that normality is built on.

By Tim Farrington