The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

“We only begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy …” W. B. Yeats

July 1950 – I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more …

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

remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it.

I spiral back to me, sitting here, swimming, drowning, sick with longing. I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disasterous effects;

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier;

I had been alone more that I could have been had I gone by myself.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

I may say: It was of great significance that I sat and laughed at myself in a convertible with the rain coming down in rattling sheets on the canvas roof. It influenced my life that I did not find content immediately and easily – – and now I am I because of that.

Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless.

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship – but the loneliness of the soul in it’s appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering –

Yes, it is like any snow, in any year, and although I have a Botany exam in two hours, I must stop a little, and look. The flakes are big and loosely put together, and the red and blue rooftops are muted and secretive. Girls bicycle by in brief spurts of color and motion, and the bare trees are that smoky-lavendar, gray and withdrawn. And just a little while ago it was summer time, and I was walking with Bob along the quiet, green, leaf-arched streets, looking up at my window, wondering how it would feel to be on the other, the inside. Well, I know now.

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.

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.

Outside it is warm and blue and April.

It is 11:30 p.m. on the evening of August first, nineteen hundred and fifty one John Blodgett is seventy years old, and I am very tired.

I shall begin by saying that I am not the girl I was a year ago. Thank Time.

We are all men, but as different as we are similar – as opposite as we are alike. We know a thing by its opposite corollary: hot by having experienced cold; good, by having decided what is bad; love by hate.

In bed, bathed, and the good rain coming down again – liquidly slopping down the shingled roof outside my window. All today it has come down, in its enclosing wetness, and at last I am in bed, propped up comfortably by pillows – listening to it spurting and drenching – and all the different timbers of tone – and syncopation. The rapping on the resonant gutters – hard, metallic. The rush of a stream down the drain pipe splattering flat on the earth, wearing away a small gully – the musical falling of itself, tinkling faintly on the tin garbage pails in a high pitched tattoo. And it seems that always in August I am more aware of the rain.

Three years ago, the hot, sticky August rain fell big and wet as I sat listlessly on my porch at home, crying over the way summer would not come again – never the same. The first story in print65 came from that “never again” refrain beat out by the rain. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

He doesn’t know that last could hurt a little if she let it. But it doesn’t because she doesn’t.

So it all moves in the pageant toward the ending, it’s own ending. Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers. For all the writing, for all the invention of engines to express & convey & capture life, it is the living of it that is the gimmick. It goes by, and whatever dream you use to dope up the pains and hurts, it goes. Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. You’ve only got so long to live. You’re getting your dream. Things are working, blind forces, no personal spiritual beneficent ones except your own intelligence and the good will of a few other fools and fellow humans. So hit it while it’s hot.

it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one.

You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again.

Every thought is a devil, a hell

I must find a core of fruitful seeds in me. I must stop identifying with the seasons, because this English winter will be the death of me.

But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: “I’m important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am.

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter – – – for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.… Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

A poseur: every poem is an ulcer: or, every ulcer should have been a poem: he quotes his friend John Ciardi in “The Canadian Businessman”. As if poetry were some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion. Ted & I left, disgusted, to go home to our private & exacting demons who demand every conscious and deep-rooted discipline, and work, and rewriting & knowledge.

I am fighting the last shreds of cold with newly & too-late acquired cocaine drops

Ever since Wednesday I have been feeling like a “new person”. Like a shot of brandy went home, a sniff of cocaine, hit me where I live and I am alive & so-there. Better than shock treatment: “I give you permission to hate your mother.”

But although it makes me feel good as hell to express my hostility for my mother, frees me from the Panic Bird on my heart and my typewriter (why?), I can’t go through life calling RB up from Paris, London, the wilds of Maine long-distance: “Doctor, can I still go on hating my mother?” “Of course you can: hate her hate her hate her.” “Thank you, doctor. I sure do hate her.”

I played, teased, welcomed mother. I may hate her, but that’s not all. I pity and love her too. After all, as the story goes, she’s my mother.

The last day of 1958: clear and heavenly blue: the day, bland, offers beauty: all weathers are lovely, if only the inner weather reflects and endows loveliness.

Ann, and the children. An insufferable woman (myself of course)

When Johnny Panic sits on my heart, I can’t be witty, or original, or creative.

We walk to the stone railing, and look down at the vista of orange tile roofs spread out below. In the valleys the church bells are beginning, clear voices speaking a language of chapel spires, separate dings and dongs rising to mingle in the rare blue air around us.

Nicola called up while we were embroiled with the curious blond Swedish lady journalist to ask if she could come and “read in our garden”. I was aghast. It is one thing to ask to come around for a cup of tea, but to ask to come and lead a private life in our garden as if it were a public park is appalling. I