on sylvia plath

As a consolation prize for my utter lack of comprehension in the vague and mysterious world of Physics, i meandered yesterday into the benign familiarity of Barnes & Noble (such beautiful acres fermenting in, sweating with solicitious black-letter syntax), and purchased The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, all 732 glorious pages.

i very much wish that Sylvia Plath had not committed suicide. i am reading sentence after syrupy sentence and i am thinking, "i have wondered those same wonders; i have ached those same aches; i have dreamed those same dreams". i think that she has crawled up inside my skull, typewriter-tapping softly and sleeping poetically between fiber and unused fiber. i very much wish that she had instead been shot by a demented lover, or been broken into many small pieces in some sort of nature-related incident, for to exclaim: "Sylvia Plath just really gets life; she just really gets it, i think" is inevitably followed by the blank stare of apathetic nonunderstanding, or the occasional flicker of recognition, say, didn't she write poetry? commit suicide? and the queer, concerned looks that follow "yes, yes she did; she blew up her own head in a gas oven." but i love the lifely Plath, the solitary and "reasonably attractive" mirror of mine, the silver-gilded Plath whose existance bubbled forth and whose dreams had not yet died.

...

"Come here," he said. "I'll whisper something: I like you, but not too much. I don't want to like anybody too much." Then it hit me and i just blurted, "I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them."
-The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, or testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.
-Sylvia Plath

Here, I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh.
-Sylvia Plath

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?
-Sylvia Plath

I am what i feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.
-Sylvia Plath

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

...You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. Again the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? ... and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off as a thumbnail sketch- "she was the sort of girl..." And end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can...
-Sylvia Plath

(all from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)