The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

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

never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.

“So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.”

and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

I read him some poetry and explained to him what I found in it.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead—after all, I had been “analyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.