bell jar

***

"

The interior voice nagging me not to be a fool - to save my skin and take off my skis and walk down, camouflaged by the scrub pines bordering the slope - fled like a disconsolate mosquito.  The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower...I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.  People and trees receded on either hand like the dark sides of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother's belly...

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky.

I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin

and essential as the blade of a knife.

"I'm going up," I said. "I'm going to do it again."

"

(s.plath, the bell jar)

***