I’ve never read Sylvia Plath, but I recently came across a passage from her novel The Bell Jar in, of all places, an article on New York’s famed Barbizon Hotel for Women in a year-old copy of Vanity Fair magazine. This passage struck a chord with me, strongly enough that I want to record it someplace, if not share it with others. I admire the craftsmanship of this paragraph, the strong imagery that so clearly illustrates a fairly nebulous idea. It”s a level of writing to which I aspire.

The thing that really gets me, though, is how strongly the passage resonates with some thoughts I’ve been having lately. I have no idea what the context is here, or even what The Bell Jar is about. But this single image, shorn of plot and standing all on its own, is powerful stuff that I find myself relating to, regretfully more than is entirely comfortable…

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 fig was a famous poet and another fig was a
brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and
another fig 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 in 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.