Issue 199 | The Sun Magazine

June 1992

Readers Write

Great Expectations

Bringing someone back to life, going through fertility treatments, spending more time with family

By Our Readers
Sy Safransky's Notebook

June 1992

The Map I Was Promised

Things I didn’t get to last week: answering the mail, giving up coffee, saving the planet.

By Sy Safransky
Quotations

Sunbeams

Why 300,000 varieties of beetles? The great English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane was once cornered by a distinguished theologian who asked him what inferences one could draw, from a study of the created world, as to the nature of its Creator. Haldane answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

David Quammen

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Encounter Above Tintern Abbey

Then he let go of me, and the meaning of the poem was clear. This man had finally brought me inside of it. Both of us had somehow been given what we came for. On the trail down to the bridge I broke out in goose flesh.

By Stephen T. Butterfield
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Living Simply

At fifty-five, I look back on a life so complicated that had I set out to make things hard for myself, I couldn’t have done a better job.

By Alan D. Brilliant
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Uncommon Prayer

Toward A New Liturgy

There is something that loves you in the world. The voice that speaks to you within, in the worst despair, is not different from the voice that called the world into being.

By Catherine Madsen
Fiction

Friday

I washed the dishes and the ashtrays and the silverware and the mugs, then rinsed them off and set them on the counter on paper towels to dry.

By Robbie Crosby
Fiction

The Carrion Heart

He came in on a royal blue 1928 Studebaker, the engine rattling, leaving a dusty cloud billowing into the desert air.

By David Bajo
Fiction

The Cruise

“Here we are in Martinique,” the man said. He was standing at the window with his hands in his hip pockets, looking out at the green lawn and the deep woods beyond.

By Robert Walter