The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

plans on the tip of my tongue.
                    “I don’t really know,” I heard
myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I
said it, I knew it was true.
                    It sounded true, and I
recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that’s been
hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces
himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really
is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a
sham.
                    “I don’t really know.”
                    “You’ll never get anywhere like
that.” Jay Cee paused. “What languages do you have?”
                    “Oh, I can read a bit of French,
I guess, and I’ve always wanted to learn German.” I’d been telling people I’d
always wanted to learn German for about five years.
                    My mother spoke German during
her childhood in America and was stoned for it during the First World War by
the children at school. My German-speaking father, dead since I was nine, came
from some manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia. My younger brother
was at that moment on the Experiment in International Living in Berlin and
speaking German like a native.
                    What I didn’t say was that each
time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those
dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
                    “I’ve always thought I’d like to
go into publishing.” I tried to recover a thread that might lead me back to my
old, bright salesmanship. “I guess what I’ll do is apply at some publishing
house.”
                    “You ought to read French and
German,” Jay Cee said mercilessly, “and probably several other languages as
well, Spanish and Italian--better still, Russian. Hundreds of girls flood into
New York every June thinking they’ll be editors. You need to offer something
more than the run-of-the-mill person. You better learn some languages.”
                    I hadn’t the heart to tell Jay
Cee there wasn’t one scrap of space on my senior year schedule to learn
languages in. I was taking one of those honors programs that teach you to think
independently, and except for a course in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and a seminar
in advanced poetry composition, I would spend my whole time writing on some
obscure theme in the works of James Joyce. I hadn’t picked out my theme yet,
because I hadn’t got round to reading Finnegans Wake, but my professor
was very excited about my thesis and had promised to give me some leads on
images about twins.
                    “I’ll see what I can do,” I told
Jay Cee. “I probably might just fit in one of those double-barreled accelerated
courses in elementary German they’ve rigged up.” I thought at the time I might
actually do this. I had a way of persuading my Class Dean to let me do
irregular things. She regarded me as a sort of interesting experiment.
                    At college I had to take a
required course in physics and chemistry. I had already taken a course in
botany and done very well. I never answered one test question wrong the whole
year, and for a while I toyed with the idea of being a botanist and studying
the wild grasses in Africa or the South American rain forests, because you can
win big grants to study offbeat things like that in queer areas much more
easily than winning grants to study art in Italy or English in England; there’s
not so much competition.
                    Botany was fine, because I loved
cutting up leaves and putting them under the microscope and drawing diagrams of
bread mold and the odd, heart-shaped leaf in the sex