What a pain…what a thrill

“What a thrill ---

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin

 Cut by Sylvia Plath

Pain, what a beautiful feeling, how such a decadent state can make us feel much more alive than joy, how can it remember us all that we are all men, and all men must die one day, how it reminds us of how fragile our structures are, and how thin is the line that divides what we can do from what we cannot.

Through all the authors we had to read in the first unit, I can only remember now, how empty I felt after realizing what they were trying to say, what they believed and how the only feeling that lingered after each reading was pain, not even sadness but pain, that creeping sensation that nothing was alright that we were living in a mad world and that nothing has changed, we haven’t change for sure. How can we read The Great Gatsby and not relate to the overcoming feeling of loneliness of Gatsby when he was surrounded by others, how can we not relate to Woolf arguing in favour of women having a room of one owns, when everything they really had was an image to maintain. What about James Joyce in the dead? He was right, again about a society that is going in circles in order to preserve traditions and how even now, when we are trying to break the standards that we consider oppressive and against our values, we face the fact that we are changing nothing, we are just going on and on, we are dancing with the same problems that we were centuries ago, women place in our society, poor versus rich people, the lies of the ones that hold the important sits in our governments, how we affect planet earth, how we want to solve things.

What I learn from those authors and why I choose this poem by Silvia Plath is because she was an extremely smart woman, but she was always depressed and I believe that most of her greatest works came from those dark times. I want to believe that if she could create beauty when she was in despair, we that live in chaos and have not learnt how to go with it can create the same, can go learn of it, can start to change what for centuries has been taboo. 

Finally I want to leave one of the most beautiful and terrible stanzas of the poem cut:  whose side are they on? O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill.

Reference:

http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/Cut