After years of seeing the book from afar on my shelf, I'm in the process of finally reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. So far I'm loving every bit of the writing and sharp wit of Plath's lead character, but I already know it's the kind of novel that deserves more than one read. There are so many brief passages in the book that could easily be pulled out as short stories on their own --- and while I'm far from finished, I want to look at one such passage from early on in the book.
Plath writes: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. 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 offbeat 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. 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.”
Plath’s depiction (beautiful, isn’t it?) reminded me a line from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: “Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities; which of these will be condemned to nonbeing and which will be actualized?” A tough but inevitable part of our condition: our limited time (mortality) forces us to make choices that inevitably banish certain possible paths to the realm of non-existence.
It is those paths that Adam Phillips labels “the unlived lives worth examining,” as he describes: “We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or to do…The myth of our potential can make our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss.”
Otherwise put: no matter which ‘path’ you choose to actualize, you will sometimes feel the vague ache of other possible lives.
There are surely a few key moments in life at which the ‘fork in the road’ is obvious. Having just graduated from university, I find myself at one of them now, and the depiction of sitting at that green fig tree feels especially resonant. Like everyone else facing an array of possibility before them (an enormous privilege, no doubt), there’s a sense that we’re on this cusp of deciding what the rest of our lives will look like. Enter the “myth of our potential."
Another quote comes to mind here – though an admittedly unconventional interpretation of it – from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “‘I love mankind,’ he said, ‘but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.’”
My interpretation in our context goes something like this: the more potential you feel your life might hold, the less enchanting each of its possible paths starts to seem. Here you stand looking out at all of the fig branches of possible lives in front of you, but no one in particular seems enough. The grandeur of all of this possibility disappears when the choice is made.
True to Plath's story, as time goes on, the possibilities also seem to start fading, and Hunter S. Thompson wrote bluntly in his letter of advice to a friend: “A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
I’m sure that a lot of people have felt this anxiety of paralysis as well, sitting in the proverbial fig tree, unsure of how to move forward. These questions left unanswered naturally allow doubt to flourish --- and the more time that passes, the more that turns to self-doubt too. It doesn't help that thanks to social media, throughout the entire indecisive process of trying to 'decide your future' (or so it feels), you're bombarded with reminders that the people around you seem to have already decided on theirs.
Last summer when I was in a particularly doubt-flooded state of mind, I came across an 1884 letter of Van Gogh’s to his brother Theo. It was one of those too-good-to-be-true moments in reading when it feels “as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
Van Gogh writes: “Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility. You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares – and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t’.”
So, facing a blank canvas, wondering how to start painting – wondering which fig to choose. Just slap something on it. In his characteristically poetic way, Van Gogh advises that ‘big picture’ isn’t always the best lens. Sometimes we just need to put one foot in front of the other without fixating on where the path might lead. (Or something less corny.)
Still pretty abstract advice, I know. But at the very least Van Gogh tries to relieve you of the weight of the figs.
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