Inside the Bell Jar

I suppose I should be happy to have been unsuccessful for most of my life. It seems that those who do succeed are mostly unhappy, having something to do with an inability to see themselves as anything but hateful. What's got me going on this tangent is Sylvia Plath's novel, The Bell Jar, which I deliberately avoided reading before but am reading now, it having fallen off my bookshelves yesterday while looking for something else. I believe it was purchased by my son for his high-school English class with his favorite teacher-- and mine by proxy-- Mr. Joe Riener, back in 2004. (Ultimately Mr. Riener was fired for being too good a teacher.) Since the book fairly jumped out at me, and since there's no time like the present, especially at my age, I started reading it right then and there.

Well, that Sylvia sure could write. It's amazing how well; many of her sentences demand several readings just because they're so delicious. Nevertheless, at the enviable and still-young age of 31, despite much critical acclaim and many prizes and being published everywhere and having two very young babies, Plath stuck her head in the oven one cold winter's day and turned on the gas. Besides that being sad, it seems like such an uncomfortable way to die, and such an awkward position in which to be found. I say if you are going to kill yourself do it with dignity like James Mason playing Norman Maine in A Star is Born--drop your robe, preferably on the beach in Malibu, walk boldly into the ocean, and just keep going.

Anyway, I digress. I don't want to talk about suicide, I want to ponder instead why so many people with so much talent are so unhappy while all the dolts with no talent at all, living horribly dull lives, who sit around watching reality TV and eating Taco Bell take-out, choose to go on forever. I guess I'm somewhere in the middle, although reading Plath's novel makes me slightly uncomfortable at how many traits I share with its author. Except for the fame and success, of course. Thank God.