![]() ![]() I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, To be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, To be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, * This reminded me of a beautiful poem by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, titled “Call Me By My True Names”: ![]() And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time…īut, perhaps, the secret of happiness is to do precisely that. ![]() I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person.* But I am not omniscient. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Among the diary entires and letters to friends, culled by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, their children, Frieda and Nicholas, and Smith College rare books curator Karen Kukil, is this existential gem from July 1950, when Plath was 18 years old - a meditation so emphatic, so embracing of the world, so full of presence, it makes it hard, tragic even, to know that only twelve years later, this wholehearted being would take her own life. Her recently uncovered stunning drawings inspired me to revisit The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, who began keeping journals at the age of eleven and remained a diarist until her death at the age of thirty. ![]()
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