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    The Sun InterviewBy Judith HertogTo RemainRaja Shehadeh on Living through Destruction in Palestine

    I have been thinking that people all over the world these days are feeling a sense of despair because, like me, they are seeing the destruction of the world as they knew it. But it has occurred to me that the real destruction of my world happened in 1948, when the Palestinians lost Palestine.

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    Readers WriteBy Our ReadersDistractions

    Reading at work, listening to music during labor, swatting gnats while meditating

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February 1985

issue 111 cover
Departments

Stubborn Light

Readers Write

Surprises

Mopping the kitchen, finding a stamp collection, blaming Shirley Temple

ByOur Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

Driven by the force of love
the fragments of the world
seek each other that the world
may come into being.

Teilhard de Chardin

February 1985

issue 111 cover
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Nuclear Mirror

It is time to go beyond the usual parameters of the nuclear debate. It is time to begin asking ourselves how The Bomb has affected the human soul itself. By exploring The Bomb as symbol, we can penetrate more deeply into the amazing mirror nuclear weapons have created. Extraordinary changes in society, in attitude and in values have emerged world-wide since Hiroshima, changes that show us a thousand ways in which The Bomb has become the guiding metaphor of our time.

ByGordon Feller
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Parting The Veil

A New Approach To Biology

Today, October 22, 1983, with several million people throughout Europe taking part in demonstrations in support of United Nations Disarmament Week and protesting against plans to deploy yet more nuclear weapons in Europe, it is impossible not to be aware of the increasing danger with which we are faced. It seems to me that unless we change the way we think and feel, the chances of our own survival and the survival of countless other living organisms on this planet are remote. I hope that we can reflect a little more about this question of our attitudes and the influence they have.

ByRupert Sheldrake
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Notes Toward A Psychology Of The Nuclear Age

I assume that at the site of a nuclear blast people would know literally nothing. One moment they would be living breathing human beings and the next moment they — and the landscape they inhabited — would not even be dust. Would there be any warning at all for such people? Does a missile even from far off make some sound that would warn them of their imminent death? (These are rhetorical questions. I really don’t care to know.) Of all the possibilities in a nuclear war, that has always seemed to me the most fortunate, to be at the site of the blast without warning and never know what hit you. Similarly, not to be at the exact site of the blast, but caught in the firestorm or the gale-like winds that surround it, might be a comparatively fortunate death in nuclear war. 

ByDavid Guy
Fiction

Buffalo Thunder

Curt said, “Indians. Buffalo. Jack, I think you’d better stay in town a while, take a vacation. Loneliness can cause hallucinations, you know.”

ByJon Remmerde
Fiction

The Party At The End

I explained: “There was a bright flash of light, the most beautiful thing you ever saw. Then came a wave of heat. It was so painful it was almost luxuriant. Then I began to feel myself melt. And then . . . then I was preparing for this party.”

BySamuel Blair
Poetry

Six

Coming up from the creek / hacking at the bushes / with a homemade sword, / he will step / on the nail, in the shit, / run through poison ivy, / get tick bit, / bee stung / lost — / his bones are growing.

ByCedar Koons
Poetry

Visiting North Carolina, June 1984

ByD. Patrick Miller
Poetry

Pieta

ByConstance Studer
Poetry

A New Friend

ByAlan Brilliant

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