- Posted on: 9 January, 2010
- 19 Years Old
- Sylvia Plath
- #19 #1963 #Esther Greenwood #Female #Novel #Pseudonym (Victoria Lucas) #The Bell Jar
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Esther Greenwood 19
I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.
I thought I would spend the summer reading Finnegans Wake and writing my thesis.
Then I would be way ahead when college started at the end of September, and able to enjoy my last year instead of swotting away with no make-up and stringy hair, on a diet of coffee and benzedrine, the way most of the seniors taking honours did, until the finished their thesis.
Then I thought I might put off college for a year and apprentice myself to a pottery maker.
Or work my way to Germany and be a waitress, until I was bilingual.
Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits.
Then I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three … nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires danged into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
