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Part four of ‘First Snow’. I suppose she is contemplating the abyss. Which is especially fun when you are a teenager or in your twenties.
_ _ _
Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, into my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself. Perhaps that would help, to synthesize my ideas into a philosophy for me, now, at the age of eighteen, but the clock ticks, ah yes...
-- Sylvia Plath, The Journals 1950
_ _ _
I am not sure what she means when she says that she is living on the edge, but since she says we are all on the brink as well, I am thinking that she is still fixated on the Cold War issues and the prospect of nuclear war, and if she were not busy with her college work, she might be able to think about it better. Since there is a good chance that the world will not go explodey, it probably makes sense to get her studies done. Such is the modern, or post-modern, world that a thinker must maintain a strong ironic perspective, with the serious and the absurd so mixed together.
_ _ _
Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, into my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself. Perhaps that would help, to synthesize my ideas into a philosophy for me, now, at the age of eighteen, but the clock ticks, ah yes...
-- Sylvia Plath, The Journals 1950
_ _ _
I am not sure what she means when she says that she is living on the edge, but since she says we are all on the brink as well, I am thinking that she is still fixated on the Cold War issues and the prospect of nuclear war, and if she were not busy with her college work, she might be able to think about it better. Since there is a good chance that the world will not go explodey, it probably makes sense to get her studies done. Such is the modern, or post-modern, world that a thinker must maintain a strong ironic perspective, with the serious and the absurd so mixed together.
