The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

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

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.

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

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

to learn that you only want them because you can’t have them.

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity.

I can only love (if that means self denial – or does it mean self fulfillment? Or both?) by giving up my love of self and ambitions

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.

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom – I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is no where to go – not home, where I would blubber and cry, a grotesque fool, into my mother’s skirts – not to men where I want more than ever now the stern, final, paternal directive – not to church which is liberal, free – no, I turn wearily to the totalitarian dictatorship where I am absolved of all personal responsibility and can sacrifice myself in a “splurge of altruism” on the altar of the Cause with a capital “C.”

You want a brilliant mind that you can stimulate, but that you can also honestly look up to.

People know who I am, and the harder I try to know who they are, the more I forget their names – I want to be alone, and yet there are times when the liquid eye and the cognizant grin of a small monkey would send me into a crying fit of brotherly love. I work and think alone. I live with people, and act. I love and cherish both. If I knew now what I wanted I would know when I saw it, who he was.

I cry out to you. I want to write you, of my love, that absurd faith which keeps me chaste, so chaste, that all I have ever touched or said to others becomes only the rehearsal for you, and preserved only for this.

I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to.

And I cry so to be held by a man; some man, who is a father.

I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.

And I waste my youth and days of radiance on barren ground.

I love too much, too wholly, too simply for any cleverness.

I hated men because they didn’t stay around and love me like a father: I could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material. I made them propose and then showed them they hadn’t a chance. I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a woman did.

All my life I have been “stood up” emotionally by the people I loved most:

I have hated men because I felt them physically necessary: hated them because they would degrade me, by their attitude:

I have experienced love, sorrow, madness, and if I cannot make these experiences meaningful, no new experience will help me.