The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

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 meanings of words you once loved, like “fairy.” to go to college fraternity parties where a boy buries his face in your neck or tries to rape you if he isn’t satisfied with 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 can never learn anything valid for truth, only momentary,

transitory sayings that apply to you in your moment, your locality, and your present state of mind. to learn 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 slaving for it. to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches. to yearn for an organism of the opposite sex to comprehend and heighten your thoughts and instincts, and 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 comforting him in bed after a hard 9–5 day at a routine business job. to realize that there are some men who like a girl as a companion in mind as well as body, and want to take picnics in the sunlight instead of parking on a dark road at midnight after an evening of sexual stimulation while walking around a crowded dance floor and embracing breast to breast, stomach to stomach. to realize that just as you will meet one of the few whom you could learn to be companionable with, the War of Double Hate will blow his guts out for the sake of 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. t...

I have much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad. Perhaps you could trace my feeling back to my distaste at having to choose between alternatives. Perhaps that’s why I want to be everyone – so no one can blame me for being I. So I won’t have to take the responsibility for my own character development and philosophy.

I don’t believe in God as a kind father in the sky. I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the bold, the loud-mouthed, the cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the mighty in arms and will, who march over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots.

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God – or the universal woman-and-man – or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way. But if I am to express what I am, I must have a standard of life, a jumping-off place, a technique – to make arbitrary and temporary organization of my own personal and pathetic little chaos. I am just beginning to realize how false and provincial that standard, or jumping-off place, must be. That is what is so hard for me to face.

Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long. You’ve got to be able to talk. That’s tough. But spend your nights learning, so you’ll have something to say. Something the “attractive intelligent man” will want to listen to.

for I am more a woman; even as I long for full breasts and a beautiful body, so do I abhor the sensuousness which they bring … I desire the things which will destroy me in the end

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

Only in the rain, sometimes, only when the rain comes, closing in your pitifully small radius of activity, only when you sit and listen by the window, as the cold wet air blows thinly by the back of your neck – only then do you think and feel sick. You feel the days slipping by, elusive as slippery pink worms, through your fingers, and you wonder what you have for your eighteen years, and you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day, a day of sun, blue skies and watercoloring by the sea.

You don’t believe in God, or a life-after-death, so you can’t hope for sugar plums when your non-existent soul rises. You believe that whatever there is has got to come from man, and man is pretty creative in his good moments – pretty mature, pretty perceptive for his age – how many years is it, now?

Again the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? And you know that whatever tangible things you do have, they cannot be held, but, too, will decompose and slip away through your coarse-skinned and death-rigid fingers. So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don’t want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch = “She was the sort of girl.…” And end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can … you’re a capitalist from way back

So you are surprised to see that you really don’t want to go home. You see how shut-in you would feel, in your little room. How closely the trees and houses and familiar paths would crowd upon you, stifling you, smothering you, enclosing you.

My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night …

As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one’s individuality it seems more and more a product of fate – – inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.