An Appetite for Life
On Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar", and how to live life more fully by choosing less.
“Don’t let the wicked city get you down.”
~ The Bell Jar
I love living in a city. I love feeling that something is always happening, and all you need to do to feel like you’re in the middle of living is step out your front door and get swept up in the rush of bodies, the babble of speech, the whirlwind swirl of dizzy commotion, the familiar unfamiliarity of new faces, the free movement of ideas and controversy, and the back and forth of progress that’s always moving somewhere, even if you can’t yet see where its heading. A city is possibility given structure.
But that’s living in a city, when you have all the time in the world. Visiting for a short break is totally different.
When I visit a city for a long weekend, I often find myself overwhelmed with things to do and only a few days in which to do them. I sift through the options by intuitively ranking them, hierarchising all the day trips and museum visits and gallery exhibitions and sights to see and people to meet. The truth is, I’ve wasted far too much time on planning itineraries, at the expense of time I could have spent exploring where I was.
This is sometimes called decision fatigue, although I think of it as choice overload: the overwhelm that comes from having so many options. Paralysis settles in, and selecting between the choices feels impossible. This choice overload recently made it difficult to pick my next book to read, until boredom with the process made me grab Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar off the shelf. This turned out to be a case of wonderful serendipity, because the dilemma of choice is at the heart of Plath’s novel.
Esther Greenwood, Plath’s sad girl narrator, has recently arrived in New York City. From the outside, she should have it made:
“A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.”
This is the story others might tell about Esther, and it’s probably the story she’d have liked to tell herself. It’s so reminiscent of the archetypal Cinderella story it might as well start with, “Once upon a time...” Sadly for Esther, her story takes her, page by page, further away from happily ever after. Rather than “steering New York like her own private car”, Esther tells us, “I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself”:
“I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus.”
Life in the digital smorgasbord of movies, music, journalism, blogs, video-essays, reviews, reactions, forums, and everything everywhere all at once — this often leaves us feeling as though we aren’t steering ourselves. As much as we like to believe that the internet’s near-infinite choice allows us to fully manifest our true selves, the experience rarely feels like that. Instead, the algorithms lead us here, steer us there, show us too much of X so we see little of Y. We live life in the passive tense.
Back when I had a smartphone, if I was asked why I’d picked it up for the twelfth time in as many minutes, after saying I’d ignore it for a while, I always had a story about how I needed to check this or confirm that. But beneath that narrative, deeper within, I’d feel the truth: that I felt compelled to go online, even if I didn’t know why.
I also had a story about why I needed all those apps in my pocket, why I followed so many podcasts and Twitter feeds and news outlets. It wasn’t evidence of an unfocused mind or lack of self-subscribed purpose; it was proof that I was an “engaged citizen”, staying up-to-date on the latest political stories and cultural happenings. I dressed up ephemera as something substantive, junk food as nourishment.1
Esther is intellectually omnivorous, and she wants the world served to her as an all-she-can-eat buffet. Her curiosity is as voracious as her insatiable appetite. She eats and eats “the richest, most expensive dishes”, in stark contrast to everyone else in New York who is “trying to reduce”. (Here, again, she rejects efforts to reduce or constrain oneself.) “No matter how much I eat,” Esther tells us, “I never put on weight.”
There’s more to this analogy than we might spot at first glance. Her curiosity is as gluttonous as her appetite — and is it just as unfulfilling? Esther puts on no weight despite gorging herself on food, and there’s a certain weightlessness to her restless mind. She wanders from botany to physics to Shakespeare, wanting to be a professor, a poet, an editor, and meanwhile there’s a certain lack of gravity to keep her grounded. It’s as if nothing that goes in is truly digested, becoming part of her.
Esther herself entwines her intellectual and culinary appetites when she describes her life “branching out” before her like a “green fig-tree”:
“From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.”
Each of us, of course, has such a tree that makes up our own lives and whose branches describe various paths we might take into one future over another. So, what makes this plurality of potentiality so problematic for Esther?
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Esther is more attracted to the idea of so many various things than she is to the actual thing itself, which is why she manically pursues her interests (until they no longer interest her) without making any progress toward any one of them. She’s trying to tend to all the fruits at once, to keep them growing for as long as she can. In the end, however, one or two of them will have to be eaten, or all of them will rot.
As I read The Bell Jar, something struck a dissonant note. The two images Plath offers are at odds with each other: on the one hand, Esther is gluttonous, literally and intellectually, while on the other, she refuses to eat any of the imagined figs from the metaphorical tree. On closing the book, I’ve come to think that this contradiction describes what it’s like to enslave oneself to perpetual emancipation. Esther says at one point that she “couldn’t settle down in either the country or the city”. When this is described as neurotic, she laughs scornfully:
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
It’s telling that soon after this scene, Esther winds up in an asylum, suicidally depressed. We know from a single line early in the book that, after the end of the novel, she becomes a mother. She has eaten one particular fig and allowed certain others to die, and she’s become well enough to reflect on her life and tell us her story. Whether she chose motherhood or it was chosen for her, the most hopeful idea in The Bell Jar is that Esther might finally be free of her indecision, free of her immature commitment to never committing, free to live at last.
Over the last few months, I’ve been decluttering my life of choice. I no longer suffer the infinite scrolls of Netflix, Spotify, social media. I’ve stepped out of the river of news feeds, which carried me off in their undertows. I don’t lose myself to the opinions of others, inflicted on me first thing in the morning before my consciousness has a chance to wake and become itself. I no longer allow someone else’s voice to replace the one in my head, the one that whispers ideas in quiet, bored moments that might turn into larger projects. I’m no longer fake-busy swiping at screens.
In giving up all the choices the online world offers, I’ve freed up time — so much time that it’s an embarrassing indictment of how much I used to squander. I can’t watch or listen to absolutely anything of the infinite variety of films and music ever made, but I never felt like I had time to do that anyway. The clock has slowed and the world has expanded, simply by reducing how many choices I have to make.
One of the best effects of this change is that I’ve been re-reading more than I used to. I’m a vocal advocate of taking a second (third, fourth, etc.) look at books already read — my “Double Take” series is devoted to doing exactly that — and I’d say that I re-read more than the average reader. But I wish I re-read even more. Given a choice by a cruel genie to spend the rest of my life reading anything I like but only once or only re-reading books I already know, I’d take the second. Depth over breadth for me.
Anyway, with fewer things to do during the day, old books hold new appeal. I can’t wait to rediscover what’s inside that novel I know I enjoyed but can’t recall a word of, or to offer some grace to a book I hated as a teenager but think deserves a second go now in my thirties. When I pick up one of these books from my library, I no longer spend the first thirty pages wondering if this is what I should be reading, and what if there’s something else worth my time, or what if something’s happening online or a new movie’s been added to Netflix, so maybe I should...
Nope. I just pick up the book and live my life.
Try reducing your clutter of options, by focusing on a few things instead of bouncing through many. Determine your own life; don’t let the algorithm choose for you. Life is waiting for you to rediscover living. We can enjoy the fruit of the fig-tree as soon as we stop over analysing which fig we should eat.
I can do no better here than to quote
, in a great piece on the value of deep reading over online skimming:“I don’t exactly want to discourage anyone from consuming political content (please like and subscribe), but I think a lot of folks could benefit from occasionally getting their minds off current affairs, not in the spirit of becoming apolitical, but in recognition of the fact that following the blow-by-blow of the news cycle doesn’t really change anything. You need to keep your batteries charged so you can do things that actually make a difference.”
“Life in the digital smorgasbord of movies, music, journalism, blogs, video-essays, reviews, reactions, forums, and everything everywhere all at once — this often leaves us feeling as though we aren’t steering ourselves.”
Yes, I feel this. And, what’s worse, is when this infects our work and becomes not just habit but expectation, as is the case for me in my employment as a marketer. It’s tragic.