The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

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.

Now I am surely becoming an incurable romantic.

… An open letter: to you whom it concerns: I won’t call you darling; that would be cute. And I’m not being cute, not tonight. I wanted to tell you how you are beginning to be the one I can talk to.

I don’t write this to you, because it is not time. I may never tell you, and, in years, I may not need to, because you might become part of my life – – – physically and mentally … and there would be no need to verbalize, because you would understand.

And so it seems I must always write you letters here that I can never send.

after I said things to you that I should not have said,

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

Such a heat the rock had, such a rugged and comfortable warmth, that I felt it could be a human body. Burning through the material of my bathing suit, the great heat radiated through my body, and my breasts ached against the hard flat stone. A wind, salty and moist, blew damply in my hair; through a great glinting mass of it I could see the blue twinkle of the ocean. The sun seeped into every pore, satiating every querulous fiber of me into a great glowing golden peace. Stretching out on the rock, body taut, then relaxed, on the altar, I felt that I was being raped deliciously by the sun, filled full of heat from the impersonal and colossal god of nature.

only the crescendo of sleepy musical chirpings of birds in neighboring trees.

For if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still aesthetically turn up his nose at promiscuity.

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul, body and pride of man?

Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars – to be a part of a scene, anonomous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. 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 …

The wet gray August morning oozed in upon her consciousness as she lay limp on the porch cot. The damp softness of the sheets was cool against her skin. In the dim half light she stretched wearily, yawned, and thought, “No, not another day beginning.” There was still time yet;

One word, one gesture, and all that is pent up in you – festered resentments, gangrenous jealousies, superfluous desires – unfulfilled – all that will burst out of you in angry impotent tears – in embarrassed sobbing and blubbering to no one in particular.

And perhaps something good has been sprouting in the small numb darkness all this while.

I am at my best in illogical, sensuous description.

But I do want to explain why I use words, each one chosen for a reason, perhaps not as yet the very best word for my purpose, but nevertheless, selected after much deliberation.

And when I read, God, when I read the taut, spare, lucid prose of Louis Untermeyer, and the distilled intensities of poet after poet, I feel stifled, weak, pallid; mealy mouthed and utterly absurd. Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man … hearing about life at second hand, feeding my body and letting my powers of perception and subsequent articulation grow fat and lethargic with disuse?