The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Page A

cycle of the fern, it
seemed so real to me.
                    The day I went into physics
class it was death.
                    A short dark man with a high,
lisping voice, named Mr. Manzi, stood in front of the class in a tight blue
suit holding a little wooden ball. He put the ball on a steep grooved slide and
let it run down to the bottom. Then he started talking about let a equal
acceleration and let t equal time and suddenly he was scribbling letters
and numbers and equals signs all over the blackboard and my mind went dead.
                    I took the physics book back to
my dormitory. It was a huge book on porous mimeographed paper--four hundred
pages long with no drawings or photographs, only diagrams and formulas--between
brick-red cardboard covers. This book was written by Mr. Manzi to explain
physics to college girls, and if it worked on us he would try to have it
published.
                    Well, I studied those formulas,
I went to class and watched balls roll down slides and listened to bells ring
and by the end of the semester most of the other girls had failed and I had a
straight A. I heard Mr. Manzi saying to a bunch of the girls who were
complaining that the course was too hard, “No, it can’t be too hard, because
one girl got a straight A.” “Who is it? Tell us,” they said, but he shook his
head and didn’t say anything and gave me a sweet little conspiring smile.
                    That’s what gave me the idea of
escaping the next semester of chemistry. I may have made a straight A in
physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned
it. What I couldn’t stand was this shrinking everything into letters and
numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves
breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the
blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in
Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.
                    I knew chemistry would be worse,
because I’d seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the
chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt
and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal
numbers after them. If I had to strain my brain with any more of that stuff I
would go mad. I would fail outright. It was only by a horrible effort of will
that I had dragged myself through the first half of the year.
                    So I went to my Class Dean with
a clever plan.
                    My plan was that I needed the
time to take a course in Shakespeare, since I was, after all, an English major.
She knew and I knew perfectly well I would get a straight A again in the
chemistry course, so what was the point of my taking the exams; why couldn’t I
just go to the classes and look on and take it all in and forget about marks or
credits? It was a case of honor among honorable people, and the content meant
more than the form, and marks were really a bit silly anyway, weren’t they,
when you knew you’d always get an A? My plan was strengthened by the fact that
the college had just dropped the second year of required science for the
classes after me anyway, so my class was the last to suffer under the old
ruling.
                    Mr. Manzi was in perfect
agreement with my plan. I think it flattered him that I enjoyed his classes so
much I would take them for no materialistic reason like credit and an A, but
for the sheer beauty of chemistry itself. I thought it was quite ingenious of
me to suggest sitting in on the chemistry course even after rd changed over to
Shakespeare. It was quite an unnecessary gesture and made it seem I simply
couldn’t bear to give chemistry up.
                    Of course, I would never have
succeeded with this