THE BELL JAR

by Sylvia Plath

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

My dream was some day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction—every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing.

I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

I had the impression it wasn’t night and it wasn’t day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.

After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.

Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I thought what a long way I had come.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s,

It never occurred to me to say no.

My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand.

Every time I wanted to figure what was east or what was west it seemed to be noon, or cloudy,

‘A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.’

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

My stocking seams were straight, my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans. Something old, something new.... But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice