Tell me why I keep picking up copies of The Bell Jar every time I go thrifting even though I already own like 6 copies? I keep forgetting and just grab it. 😂 Anyway, I'm FINALLY going to read it today!
Tell me why I keep picking up copies of The Bell Jar every time I go thrifting even though I already own like 6 copies? I keep forgetting and just grab it. 😂 Anyway, I'm FINALLY going to read it today!
My #Tuesdaytunes is “Cemetery Somewhere” by John Muirhead.
Sylvia Plath wrote:
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
I found this collection to be so moving. Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite authors and there werenso many poems that touched me in this collection. Highly recommend this one. #poetrymatters
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.But they were part of me. They were my landscape.
“I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”
“I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”
This books makes me feel tired. Tired of repressing every self-doubting thought, packed in a little pocket of worries in my brain, about the future, myself, and how I allow others‘ opinions on these to shape my own life. I feel like I almost betray Plath with the way I lead my life (as if she would care) - setting a bell jar around my own life, with my own hands. This book paints my Bell Jar bright red, right in my face, and I hate that.
Mixed feelings about this one. I much preferred it to some of the contemporary/millennial books on similar topics. It felt both of its time and also very much not; there were times the writing put me in mind of Ottessa Moshfegh. Yet I didn‘t love it. There remains the obsessive self-centredness of the main character that I disliked here and have done in other books and I struggled with the second half. Still, I‘m glad I read it.