The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

“Even the apostles were tentmakers,” she’d say. “They had to live, just the way we do.”

I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead,

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.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

I don’t know what we talked about, but as the countryside, already deep under old falls of snow, turned us a bleaker shoulder, and as the fir trees crowded down from the gray hills to the road edge, so darkly green they looked black, I grew gloomier and gloomier.

A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death.

The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note over and over, like a nervous bird.

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