The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

Yesterday was the first day of work: a bad day. Spent time on a very desperately elaborate psychological idea and wrote maybe one good image (the boy with the whole ocean bottled in his head) to a raft of brittle, stilted artificial stuff. Not touching on my deep self. This bad beginning depressed me inordinately. It made me not hungry nor want to cook, because of the bestialness of eating and cooking with out keen thought and creation. The beach: too late, after a hot walk along a gravelly, sunny, sidewalk on Route 6, the deathly pink, yellow and pistachio colored cars shooting by like killer instruments from the mehcanical tempo of another planet. Broken glass, then the scrub pine shadowing Bracket road, the whisk of bird and squirrel in underbrush, green berried shrubs, and the rough tar. A great blue span of Atlantic under the cliff at Nauset Light, and a swim in the warmish green seeweeded water, rising and falling with the tall waves at tide turn. Lay in sun far up beach, but the sun was cold, and the wind colder. The boom, boom of great guns throbbing in the throat, then the ride back, bad-tempered. Making mayonnaise, and it coming out well. Fine. Then, grubbing over supper, with the badly begun poem like an albatross round the neck of the day, nothing else. And the tables and chairs insulting the way they are when a human being tries to live their merely phenomenal life and miserably doesn’t succeed. They go smug, I-told-you-so.

Syl having a bad day of writing. lol.