The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

to be loved by a man who admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself.

But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident,

every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time …

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.

In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in.

lyrically-formed child-body.

dying flowers smote me like the clean quick cut of a knife. And the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.”

“I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into peopl...

When you catch your mother, the childhood symbol of security and rightness, crying desolately in the kitchen; when you look at your tall, dreamy-eyed kid brother and think that all his potentialities in the line of science are going to be cut off before he gets a chance … it kind of gets you. –

Yes, I was infatuated with you; I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those. –

If only it doesn’t swallow up my desires to express myself in a smug, sensuous haze. Sure, marriage is self expression, but if only my art, my writing, isn’t just a mere sublimation of my sexual desires which will run dry once I get married.

intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn’t I expect it in a man?

The lights made the city bright with a strange, artificial dawn.

have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.”

I said, “I love it. It’s me. It’s individual.”

will be a little god in my small way.

that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and

transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print?

From now on when a boy starts telling me about his lost loves I am going to run in the opposite direction screaming loudly.

Where will the careless conglomeration of environment, heredity and stimulus lead me?

and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn’t the right one – not at all.

And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves, without identity.

is Fate.” If I had to hazard three words to sum up my philosophy of life, I’d choose those.

I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I’ve got to admire someone to really like them deeply – to value them as friends.

And does not my desire to write come from a tendency toward introversion begun when I was small, brought up as I was in the fairy-tale world of Mary Poppins and Winnie-the-Pooh? Did not that set me apart from most of my school mates? – the fact that I got all A’s and was “different”

All this may be a subtle way of egoistically separating myself from the common herd, but take it for what it’s worth.

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I. I am sitting at my desk looking out at a bright antiseptic January day, with an icy wind whipping the sky into a white-and-blue froth.

I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive.

After being conditioned as a child to the lovely never-never land of magic, of fairy queens and virginal maidens,

of little princes and their rose bushes, of poignant bears and Eyore-ish donkeys, of life personalized, as the pagans loved it, of the magic wand, and the faultless illustrations – the beautiful dark-haired child (who was you) winging through the midnight sky on a star-path in her mothers box of reels, – – of Griselda in her feather-cloak, walking barefoot with the Cuckoo in the lantern-lit world of nodding Mandarins, – – – of Delight in her flower-garden with the slim-limbed flower sprites, – – – of the Hobbit and the dwarves, gold-belted with blue and purple hoods, drinking ale and singing of dragons in the caverns of the valley – – – – all this I knew, and felt, and believed. All this was my life when I was young. To go from this to the world of “grown-up” reality. To feel the tender skin of sensitive

child-fingers thicken; to feel the sex organs develop and call loud to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard,) bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood. 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? to learn snide and smutty mean...

burying his fingers in the flesh of your breast. to learn that there are a million girls who are beautiful and each day that more leave behind the awkward teen-age stage, as you once did, and embark on the adventure of being loved and petted. to be aware that you must compete somehow, and yet that wealth and beauty are not in your realm. to learn that a boy will make a careless remark about “your side of town” as he drives you to a road house in his father’s latest chromium-plated convertible. to learn that you might-have-been more of an “artist” than you are if you had been born into a family of wealthy intellectuals. to learn that you ...

that love can never come true, because the people you admire like Perry are unattainable since they want someone like P.K. to learn that you only want them because you can’t have them. to learn that you can’t be a revolutionary. to learn that while you dream and believe in Utopia, you will scratch & scrabble for your daily bread in your home town and be damn glad if there’s butter on it. to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slav...

to realize that most American males worship woman as a sex machine with rounded breasts and a convenient opening in the vagina, as a painted doll who shouldn’t have a thought in her pretty head other than cooking a steak dinner and comfo...

shedding the light of freedom on the darkened half of the oppressed peoples of the world. to study the futility of war, and read the UN charter, and then to hear the announcer on the radio blithely announce “The stars and stripes march” for our courageous fighting forces. to know that there is a mental hospital on the hill in back of the college,29 and to have seen the little shoddy man walk out of the gate, his face a mongoloid study of slobbering foolishness, and to have seen him somberly drop an eyelid in a wink at you, while eyes and mouth remained wide open and fleshily ignorant of their existance in his face. to have won $100 for writing a story and not believe that I am the one who wrote it. to know that other girls read my biography in Seventeen and envy me as one of the chosen fortunates, as I

envied others two years ago. to know that for those qualities I covet in others, those same others covet qualities in still others. to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman’s agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment to take a walk with Marcia Brown30 and love her for her exuberance, to catch some of it, because it’s real, and once again love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch, because you’ve got a body & mind to exercise, and that is your lot, to exercise & use it as much as you can, never mind whose

You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual

and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?”

believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will

How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard

and lived? Sure,

I

dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man. In other words, I must pour my energies through

the direction and force of my mate. My only free act is choosing o...

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or