With touching concern, several subscribers have e-mailed
recently to ask if I’m still upright and breathing and, if so, why Sy
Safransky’s Notebook hasn’t appeared in The Sun since last
February. Have I given up writing? Am I seriously ill? Has the staff
been waiting for just the right moment — after the Super Bowl, before
the start of Daylight Saving Time — to announce my demise?
Those readers can stop worrying. I’m still writing, I’m
healthier than I have any right to be, and Sy Safransky’s Notebook will
return next month — because the book I’ve been working on since the dawn
of time is finally finished. It’s called Many Alarm Clocks,
and it’s a collection of my Notebook entries. If you’re wondering why it
took so long to put together a volume comprised of previously published
work, your guess is as good as mine.
What follows is an edited version of the preface to the book. Many Alarm Clocks
won’t be easy to find in most bookstores, nor will it be available from
Amazon, because we all have to draw the line somewhere. To order a
copy, visit our website: thesunmagazine.org/books.
I write in my notebook early in the morning, almost always before
the sun comes up. (To the sun it doesn’t matter, but it matters to me.)
Some of the entries are long and carefully considered; some are just two
or three run-on sentences: fragments of essays I’ll never write,
snatches of conversation, postcards from the dream realm.
Usually I write for at least an hour; on some mornings maybe a half-hour. Writing something
every day is important to me — no matter how little sleep I’ve gotten
or what mood I’m in. When I’m faithful to this practice, my skin has a
rosy glow, the car starts in the morning, my cats come when I call. But
I’m not always faithful. Sometimes I oversleep, or I wake up worried
about an impending deadline and head straight to the office. Even then, I
try to remember what the physician-poet William Carlos Williams said.
He was also a busy man, known to compose poems between seeing patients.
He insisted that “five minutes, ten minutes, can always be found.”
I use a rollerball pen. I write on narrow-ruled paper. The paper
is supposed to discourage big, loopy handwriting and keep my ego in
check — a failed experiment, though I persevere.
For more than half my life I’ve lived in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina. So, weather permitting and clichés about the South
notwithstanding, my favorite place to write is in a wicker chair on the
porch. Does it matter that I grew up in a kosher household in Brooklyn,
New York — one set of dishes for meat and one for dairy; nonstop
complaining in both English and Yiddish — and will never be mistaken for
a Southerner, let alone a Southern writer? What matters is showing up
in the morning. The Muse couldn’t care less where I’m from.
Nonetheless, it’s here in this Southern college town that I
borrowed fifty dollars and started a magazine more than forty years ago.
And it’s here that The Sun continues to be published every month: an ad-free, independent journal to which I still devote most of my waking hours.
I used to write essays every month for The Sun. After
all, one advantage of starting your own magazine is that, for better or
worse, it gives you a place to publish your own writing. But here’s the
catch: if your magazine grows beyond your wildest dreams, you’re likely
to become a hardworking editor and publisher who can barely find time to
write. (It doesn’t help that I’m the slowest writer in the world;
others may make this claim, but, trust me, I’m slower.) These days,
instead of essays, I publish pages from my notebook.
Nine-tenths of what I write in the morning never gets into print
because there’s a thin line between being self-revealing and
self-indulgent and, at least in broad daylight, I try not to cross it.
But every month or so I type up the sentences that seem to have some
merit. I edit. I edit some more. The words left standing are marched
single file into a section of the magazine called Sy Safransky’s
Notebook. That’s where all the journal entries in Many Alarm Clocks originally appeared.
Many Alarm Clocks isn’t a book in which you’ll find any
practical advice about how to start a magazine or how to run a magazine
or how to circle the wagons in defense of the serial comma. Nor is this
book likely to help writers who regularly submit work to The Sun
and are understandably dejected over how many times they’ve been
rejected, and who would like to understand why I’m so hard to please. My
heart goes out to them, but I don’t understand it either.
There’s a lot I don’t understand, as the book should make
abundantly clear. In it I criticize my own writing and ruminate about
love and loss, and faith and doubt, and hypocritical Republicans and
feckless Democrats, and the wayward republic to which, hand over heart, I
pledged allegiance as a schoolboy. I write about being a Jew who keeps a
picture of a Hindu guru on his wall and sometimes prays to Jesus; and
about being a husband and a father and, most recently, a grandfather;
and about eating too much and about not meditating enough and about
getting older every day no matter how many vitamins I take. Sometimes I
talk to the dead. Sometimes I argue with God.
Though drawn from the magazine, Many Alarm Clocks isn’t a
random collection of Notebook pages. From more than two thousand
published entries I selected those that best fit a handful of recurring
themes, trying to avoid the temptation to make myself look wiser than I
am, less afraid of dying, less afraid of living. Then I braided them
together along a more-or-less chronological arc that begins in 2000 and
spans nearly fifteen years. This last part turned out to be more
challenging than I’d anticipated. If only I’d paid more attention when
my grandmother, seemingly effortlessly, braided together several strands
of dough into one magnificent loaf of challah. What would she have
thought, I wonder, of that confused-looking man in rumpled clothes, his
hair disheveled, pacing back and forth week after week in front of a
wall covered with bulletin boards, compulsively arranging and
rearranging more than six hundred three-by-five index cards, each with
an individual journal entry on it?
Since the themes in Many Alarm Clocks repeat themselves, I
sometimes repeat myself. For example, I often write about my wife,
Norma, because, after having been married to her for more than thirty
years, I’m still in love, and still regularly reminded how difficult it
is to love another person the way she deserves to be loved. So there’s
probably too much arguing with Norma, and too much lovemaking with
Norma, and too many references to the moonlight on Norma’s long, dark
hair. (As the poet Jack Gilbert wrote, “People complain about too many
moons in my poetry. / Even my friends ask why I keep putting in the
moon. / And I wish I had an answer.”)
One of The Sun’s editors suggested that there’s “too much
about loneliness.” I agree. What business do I have being so lonely?
I’m a happily married man. I’d like an answer!
I also use the word God too much. (One hundred sixty-one
times, God forgive me.) “There’s a lot of coffee in this manuscript,”
another staff member said. “You could open up an espresso stand.” There
are two references to how many words the Inuit have for snow, two quotes
by Eckhart Tolle, two quotes by Woody Allen, singing birds on page 62 and page 64, and three references to making love not war.
Though I tried to keep topical entries to a minimum, more than a
few chapters are devoted to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
and the misguided and shameful “war on terror” that followed. Because
some Sun readers deplore my politics, and others wish I’d stick
with the politics and stop obsessing about my so-called self, it’s
possible that some of you who plunk down good money for the book are
going to be displeased. That’s why every sentence comes with a
money-back guarantee.
A note about how to read the book: any way you want, of course.
This is still mostly a free country, unless the government has decided
you’re an enemy of freedom. You have the right to read back to front.
You have the right to jump around, if you like jumping. But to avoid
confusion I suggest you start at the beginning. Some of the entries were
written by a middle-aged man who’d just gained a few pounds; some by a
man in his sixties who’d just lost a few pounds. His president was
George Walker Bush; his president was Barack Hussein Obama. His country
was fighting one war; no, two wars; no, a never-ending war.
The title Many Alarm Clocks is purloined from the
enigmatic spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff, who maintained that most of
us live in a trance state, a kind of waking sleep, but that it’s
possible, through a rigorous process of self-transformation, to wake up
and discover our true nature. I don’t presume to grasp the breadth and
depth of Gurdjieff’s teaching, and the jury still seems to be out on
whether he was a great mystic or a great trickster, or both. But
habitual early risers like me are sometimes tempted to claim the moral
high ground and forget that getting out of bed is the easy part. So I
value his reminder that “a man may be awakened by an alarm clock. But
the trouble is that a man gets accustomed to the alarm clock far too
quickly and ceases to hear it. Many alarm clocks are necessary and
always new ones.”
Just to be clear: I’m not a follower of Gurdjieff. Many Alarm Clocks
isn’t a guidebook to spiritual awakening. And though I read books by
spiritual teachers, and sometimes interview spiritual teachers, and
often describe my work with The Sun as “my spiritual path
disguised as a desk job,” I’m asleep much of the time, too. Every day
I’m humbled by how challenging it is, during our brief stay on this
mysterious planet, to wake up and stay awake.
