Issue 171 | The Sun Magazine

February 1990

Readers Write

The Bomb

“The Ed Sullivan Show,” 50,000 tons of dynamite, the word hope

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Cosmic Mysteries, Cosmic Hype

A Hard Look At The New Age

There is no “new age,” or every age is a “new age.” Every randomly defined period of history is (of course) “new” when it is happening; yet all periods of history are subject to the eternal return of events and meanings. If we try to name the features by which observers declare a present new age, we find only some of the oldest and most conservative human activities: millennialism, the sacred earth, channeling and mediumship, communication with nonhuman entities, ritual participation in food and medicine, faith healing, and shamanism. These were also hallmarks of the so-called Sixties revival, a new age which was partially eclipsed by the materialism of the late Seventies.

By Richard Grossinger
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Facing A Few Of The Facts

What are you going to do? I mean really: what are you going to do? Do you actually believe anything is going to stop the drift toward disaster? The drift of an entire planet? Do you actually believe we’re going to be saved? Everything is heading straight to hell, the whole thing is falling apart, the whole world is going insane. Do you really believe all this can be halted or reversed? It’s too late, it’s all over. Just dig it.

By Martin Glass
Fiction

The Bomb Lost In Its Own Dark Dreaming

Basically I’m a very simple guy. I either sleep or burst into flames. That is all. If the truth be told, I have no preference between the two. I was made manifest here for rather nefarious ends in 1945.

By Michael Ortiz Hill
Fiction

Testifying

“What did he say?”

“Something like, ‘At approximately seven miles from the epicenter of a nuclear blast, the eyes of anyone looking in the direction of the flash will be melted.’ And then he just sat down again. It was like he was reading from a script.”

By Donald N. Unger
Fiction

Traveling Light

It is 1 in the morning in California, where I live now, 4 a.m. in North Carolina where Grandfather sits in the kitchen. Through the screen door, past a curtainless window, I watch him before entering.

By Kathy Riley
Fiction

Sarah Jane

Sarah Jane tried to suppress the fluttery feeling that swept through her at the thought of him riding by just beyond the fence rails, looking at her with a faint hint of a smile, raising his broad-brimmed hat with a nod of his head.

By Artelle G. Weer