I read the Bell Jar recently. I didn't like it really. It didn't hold up so much as a single coherent book and didn't hold my interest. It didn't read as poignantly and personal as Plath's poetry, but still, there was one quote I couldn't help rereading (even writing down somewhere). I kind of wish this single quote had been the entire book:


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.


And in a book largely about burgeoning depression this quote fits the bill. To see every permutation of a life before your eyes and be unable to follow any. That's hell, or at least a purgatory, and it hurts, right in the temple. And as a youth it is easy to relate. We are taught from an early age we can be anything we want to be, so of course all we think about is everything we want to be. And the list goes on and on and on and as we get older all of our future selves become more tangible and at the same time all the more impossible because the idea of choosing means we don't want to choose any.

We're all given very little in the world. Some get more, and some less, but the starting point and common denominator is the same: one single life. So how is that we should live that life? To follow or lead? To wait or to enter the underbush with a machete clearing?

When we fall asleep or at least try to we see the branches and we even see the footholds and the view from the top. But there is a certain anxiety in this kind of prophecy that keeps us pinned in the crotch of the tree, the crotch where Sylvia Plath ended up being entombed. As she says, to go chose one means to sacrifice the rest and as we know she sacrificed them all.

I don't really remember Cider House Rules much but I remember how the main characters were always saying "we'll wait and see." They'll see how things turn out, they'll figure what needs to be figured out when the time comes. But how do you know when the time comes? Maybe the time will come and it'll already be too late?

But there is one part of this metaphor that doesn't fit. We aren't branches, we are each an entire tree, and the lives that Plath envisions are only just one branch in our entirety. Each relationship we tender amounts to a branch. And maybe we're supposed to sit in the crotch of the tree and water them all. I'm not worried, I've got sunlight and water.