Browse Sections
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
January 2003
I haven’t memorized many poems, but I’ve never forgotten Richard Brautigan’s “Star-Spangled Nails”: “You’ve got / some Star-Spangled / nails / in your coffin, kid. / That’s what / they’ve done for you, / son.” It was published in 1968, when the death toll of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam had climbed to thirty thousand.
January 2003December 2002
It takes so long to rub the sleep from my eyes, to shake off the dreams of my father and my father’s father, to remember that, like me, they were just men. Not patriarchs. Not father figures. Just men.
December 2002October 2002
When Norna mentioned to our neighbor Manny that we’d be going away soon to celebrate our nineteenth wedding anniversary, Manny, who’s been married fifty-two years, said, “It’s a good start.”
October 2002September 2002
My feelings change like the changing seasons. The trees will be bare soon and the darkness will call to me again. Miklós Radnóti: “Sometimes a year looks back and howls, / then drops to its knees. / Autumn is too much for me.”
September 2002August 2002
I get up early. I wait for the light. I still trust the dawn more than I trust religion, more than I trust philosophy. Every morning the darkness disappears; morning never lets me down.
August 2002July 2002
Three thousand people were killed when the World Trade Center was attacked; to read aloud a list of their names would take two hours. Six million people were killed when the Nazis attacked European Jewry, reducing it, too, to rubble; to read aloud a list of those names would take six months.
July 2002May 2002
As long as I’m still trying to curry favor — with my dead father, with my admiring readers — I’m not writing from the heart, not really. What a busy little gardener I’ve become, pruning these sentences with such care, clippers always at the ready, clip clip. But beyond the rose garden is the meadow and beyond the meadow is the forest and deep inside the forest is the river and the river runs to the sea. I can’t get to the sea by working on my roses, by making them picture perfect.
May 2002April 2002
I’m a year older than President Bush. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t seem like much of a father figure to me. Or maybe he’s as much of a father figure as this foolish nation deserves. Nearly everyone is behind him now.
April 2002March 2002
Is it possible to live each day knowing that everything will go wrong — that everything is falling apart right now — yet remembering, too, that this in no way denies the living truth, the love at the heart of existence?
March 2002February 2002
I don’t have an American flag on my car or my front door. But I’m more of a patriot than Attorney General John Ashcroft, who studies the U.S. constitution as if it were a menu in a fashionable Washington, D.C., restaurant from which he’s free to pick and choose.
February 2002
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today