bluelikegold

I just finished reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.  At first I wasn’t that impressed, but as she got more into her story, so did I.  In some ways, I think she simply saw through all the falsity of the world she was in, especially the New York fashion world, but had no idea what to do about it.  Plath knew she was expected to live in that world and be one of those people, but she wasn’t.  Not everyone adapts well to a completely different lifestyle, and Plath was one of those people.

However, and of course this is just my opinion - Plath has been diagnosed and discussed and analyzed by people far more intelligent than I for more than 50 years - I believe Plath’s ‘problems’ began the day her father died.  As she herself said her first nine years: “sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth”.  She had idolized her father, and the time of her life in which he was still alive, once he was gone she started falling into a black hole.  Her mother seemed only to have pushed her farther down into the hole, from what I can tell, not only from The Bell Jar, but from other readings, Plath’s mother was not only condescending, but one of the people who expected Plath to live as everyone else did, not as she wanted to.  Plath’s life was only made more difficult by her experiences in mental institutions, at a time where nurses could say whatever they wanted, regardless of the effect they would have on a patient.  (I won’t even get into her husband, a distinct replacement for her father who cheated on her.)

I find it sad, of course, when someone commits suicide, but even more so when someone with such a gift does so.  I have been through depression myself, but never to the extent of wanting to end my life.  I love my children and husband too much, but also, I can always see beauty in life.  I want to live as long as I can to experience as much of that beauty as possible.  It is intriguing to me that those who create beauty many times are the ones who are in the bell jar, suffocating, unable to see the beauty for the fog that surrounds them.

“Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.”

Alberto Manguel; The Library at Night (via debechemode)