The Journals of Sylvia Plath
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Read between June 20 - June 23, 2025
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Sylvia Plath was a person of many masks, both in her personal life and in her writings. Some were camouflage cliché facades, defensive mechanisms, involuntary. And some were deliberate poses, attempts to find the keys to one style or another. These were the visible faces of her lesser selves, her false or provisional selves, the minor roles of her inner drama.
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Nothing is real except the present, and already I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.
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Woman is but an engine of ecstasy, a mimic of the earth from the ends of her curled hair to her red-lacquered nails. Then I think, remembering the family of beautiful children that lie asleep upstairs: Isn’t it better to give in to the pleasant cycles of reproduction, the easy, comforting presence of a man around the house?
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I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disastrous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely, without misgiving, and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.
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Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?
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Why am I so perturbed by what others rejoice in and take for granted? Why am I so obsessed; why do I so hate what I am being drawn into so inexorably? Why, instead of going to bed in the kindly, erotic dark, and smiling languidly to myself in the night, say “Someday I will be physically and mentally satiated, if I lead myself in the right path …” Why do I sit up later, until the physical fire grows cold, and lash my brains into cold calculating thought?
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My greatest trouble, arising from my basic and egoistic self-love, is jealousy. I am jealous of men—a dangerous and subtle envy which can corrode, I imagine, any relationship. It is an envy born of the desire to be active and doing, not passive and listening. I envy the man his physical freedom to lead a double life—his career, and his sexual and family life. I can pretend to forget my envy; no matter, it is there, insidious, malignant, latent.
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The largest emotional reaction over the United States will be a rather large, democratic, infinitely bored and casual and complacent yawn.
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Its biggest weapon is and has been the image of myself as a perfect success: in writing, teaching and living. As soon as I sniff nonsuccess in the form of rejections, puzzled faces in class when I’m blurring a point, or a cold horror in personal relationships, I accuse myself of being a hypocrite, posing as better than I am, and being, at bottom, lousy.