The Fig Tree
I love Sylvia Plath. I relate to her writing, perhaps, more than any other writer. I am rereading The Bell Jar and am reminded of a handful of the quotes that speak most to me.
I hope you enjoy them!
Her radiant smile here reminds me that life is not linear and even the most severe depression has moments of rest.
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
“It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”
“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
“What I want back is what I was.”
“Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.”
“How we need another soul to cling to.”
“My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen.”
Finally, I hope you especially enjoy what may very well be my favorite passage from The Bell Jar. This excerpt is from Chapter Seven.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting 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.”
