The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.

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. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

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.

idle reveries.

And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots “I think, therefore I am,” whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait.

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?

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.

a moonhappy night pouringlight on the dew. banalitybanalitybanality.

(honestly, I am so disgusted with my mentality. I am not deep, I don’t work, I revel and go lax with physical comforts. I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.)

I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.

New York: pain, parties, work.

while at my back is always the mocking tick: A Life is Passing. My Life.

God get me in my own heaven, he in his.

Saturday night: March 8: One of those nights when I wonder if I am alive, or have been ever.

All fears are figments: I make them up.

Letter to an Over-grown, Over-protected, Scared, Spoiled Baby:

have to be creatively “existential”. It is damn hard, because I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.