What is clear is that at seventeen, Plath is tussling with precisely those complexities that make a person, feeling out the boundaries of the self, that resident-alien of body and mind: To this, a necessary addendum: The hubristic assumption that her marriage was the cause of her tragedy - an assumption tragically common in our age of snap judgments and superficial impressions masquerading as informed opinions, with which people don’t hesitate to impale others whenever Plath and Hughes are mentioned - is a disservice to the seething cauldron of complexity that is a human life, to say nothing of the double complexity of human relationships it is also an assumption that fails to account for the still barely understood neurochemistry of creativity and mental illness. Illustration by Quentin Blake from Plath’s The Bed Book,’ a children’s book written for her own kids. Spare me from cooking three meals a day - spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light and mock myself as I mock others. In a sentiment calling to mind Susan Sontag’s memorable assertion that “a writer is a professional observer,” teenage Plath adds:Īt the present moment I am very happy, sitting at my desk, looking out at the bare trees around the house across the street… Always I want to be an observer. But I feel free - unbound by responsibility. In reflecting back upon these last sixteen years, I can see tragedies and happiness, all relative - all unimportant now - fit only to smile upon a bit mistily. Every day is so precious I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older. Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. In the introduction, Plath’s mother speaks of the “psychic osmosis” she shared with young Sylvia and cites a journal entry - for the beloved poet was among history’s most dedicated diarists - in which her 17-year-old daughter writes: Tucked between their lines is the enormity of emotion that animated the poet’s restless spirit. In 1975, nearly a decade before Plath’s posthumous Pulitzer Prize and before her journals were published, the world got its first glimpse of the turbulent and wildly creative inner landscape this troubled genius inhabited - Aurelia Plath, the poet’s mother, edited a loving selection of Sylvia’s letters to her family, published as Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 ( public library). Can a life be lived with wholehearted exuberance and end by heartbreaking despair, without the fact of the latter negating the truth of the former? Hardly anything poses this question more acutely than the short, exuberant, and tragic life of beloved poet Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963). Whether because we are wired by our cognitive circuitry or conditioned by our culture of cynicism, we tend to be profoundly incapable of recognizing that contradictory emotions, beliefs, states, and dispositions can coexist within a single person, at different times and even at the same time, complementing and enriching one another rather than canceling each other out.
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