“I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart…I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.”
- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Have you ever had that feeling when you read something written by a writer who lived decades (even centuries) before you were born but somehow it feels like they took a screenshot of your mind and used it as a reference for their work? (You may take a breath now, sorry*). I’m sure you must know what I’m talking about - when writers just know how to put the unnameable into words in a way that makes you feel so… seen. This is exactly how I felt when I came across this Sylvia Plath quote on my Pinterest feed. I then went on to download the entire 700 or so pages of her unabridged journals and made it through at least a hundred of them before I had to stop. It was uncanny…the lady wrote things I was thinking way before I had even thunk them! I was even prompted for a minute to stop this whole business of blogging itself because what could I come up with that she hadn’t already felt and written about? How did a long-dead writer know me better than I knew myself? Did I have no original experience at all in my 22 years of living? Were my precious diary entries just diluted mirages of Sylvia Plath’s journal, was I just Sylvia Plath from Wish? Whew. A lot of questions to which I have no answers, and some of which I’m sure warrant no answers. Considering changing this blog to a daily Plath fan page (since I apparently have nothing new to say anyway),
Yours in existential crises,
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*According to Pico Iyer’s “In Praise of the Humble Comma”, a sentence without a comma is like a road without road signs; it makes for very breathless reading (and dangerous driving, of course). “The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said -- could it not? -- of the humble comma.”
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