I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.
Like many of the prompts on this website, this prompt includes several question sets. You can choose which one to respond to (or you can choose to respond to another set).
Set A:
If you knew of Plath previously, did the passage reinforce your sense of her or change it?
If you knew of Plath previously, did the passage reinforce your sense of her or change it?
If you didn't know of Plath previously, do some research on her life and consider: How does incorporating a reference to Plath at the beginning of a book frame reader expectations of the narrative that follows?
Set B:
What did you think of the message Plath's quotation communicates about life and desire? Consider: is having a wide range of desires and ambitions important to thrive in life? Or is it a recipe for disappointment?
Would you say that people in our society more often fail to "dream big" or do they fail to be realistic about their ambitions?
Responding to Set A, I knew vaguely of Sylvia Plath's life and how it ended, and I think that it fits pretty well with the theme of the book. It set up a tone of disappointment and depression because Plath had what many would consider success, family and fame, but it wasn't the life she wanted.
ReplyDelete-Byron
Set B:
ReplyDeleteHaving a wide variety of ambitions and desires is what drives most of us along. It’s usually what fuels us to get up each day, but sometimes it’s important to realize that ambitions can set us up for disappointment and that’s not bad. Disappointments can be what encourage us to create new dreams and desires that we can achieve instead.
I would also say that people tend to fail at being truly realistic with dreams. This is because we choose to limit our views of our dreams. We still “dream big” but we limit the pathways to accomplish each dream.
-Elliot Riden
Responding to Set A:
ReplyDeleteI did not know about Sylvia Plath's life. I did some reading, and learning about her story changed my view of this quote. Initially, her words gave me this hunger for life and all of its possibilities. After learning about her life, I think she was torn between those possibilities and was too exhausted to pursue or understand them. I think this is a fitting beginning to the book, because it seems Plath and Nora share a similar outlook on life.
- Jenna Whitehead
DeleteSet B:
ReplyDeleteWhile having dreams that can seem unattainable often lead to disappointment, as seen in the story, the benefits of having dreams and desires in life outweigh the possibility of failure. People need to have desires, goals, dreams, and hopes in order to have something to want to wake up in the morning for. When feeling like there's nothing to work towards, or feeling as though there is no way to reach said goals, the outcome is likely indifference towards life or sometimes even hopeful for death. Nora felt as if she had no other possibility of living a fruitful, successful life, and the outcome was her trying to take her own life.
- Adalyn Winters
Set B:
ReplyDeleteI think her quotation explains the overwhelming feeling of time constantly running. Life only goes forward and her quote displays the stress and joy of having so many desires at once. You can feel her disappointment in how she will “never be all the people I want and never live all of the lives I want” but also the excitement in her ambitions to “feel all the shades, tones, and variations [of life]”. To thrive in life is relative. I don’t think that having a wide range of desires and ambitions is necessarily important to thrive in life because you could find something that you love and be fully content in life from doing that one thing. You may not need an array of ambitions. Disappointment is a part of life. It’s pretty much inevitable. If anything I think a wide range of desires and ambitions is a chance for more joy. If one thing doesn’t work, you have many other interests.
I would say that in our society people more often fail to “dream big” rather than failing to be realistic. Age, mentality, circumstance all contribute to more realistic ambitions.
Responding to Set B - Plath's quotation highlights the inherent limitation of individuality in the wider context of the infinite diversity of life. The individual cannot live, nor fully understand, the whole range of experiences to be had. All potential paths cannot be explored given that the time span of human life is so greatly limited. This quote speaks to the human desire to explore all potential paths and, perhaps, a degree of frustration at the fact that this is simply not possible. Being keen observers and naturally scientific creatures, human beings want to feel widely and experiment with different emotions and stimuli. Having a wide range of desires and ambitions, therefore, is healthy and beneficial in that it may open doors to new possibilities and new opportunities, with the ultimate end of having lived to the fullest extent that one can before they must leave the stage for good. Subjectively, this seems like a way to truly thrive and to make the most of one's own time in this world. Although inherently, it is not possible to realize all of one's ambitions, the disappointment is outweighed by the ultimate good of giving purpose to life that compels the individual forward. Members of American society often set goals that are large and important to them which, on the grand scale, may not be perceived as lofty or ambitious. What may be a small goal to one person may give purpose to another. It is therefore that I would conclude that there should be no labels attached to ambitions so long as they drive the individual member of our society and do not bring harm to that person or others. Americans (and, extending "our society" to include the entire human community) may benefit from reflecting on their desires more and creating goals that are short-term and long-term, balancing both "dreaming big" and "being realistic".
ReplyDelete-Eli Grasso
This quote reinforced my idea of who Sylvia Plath truly was. As I have read many excerpts of her poetry, I imagine Plath as a woman with a heart too big for her body and a mind too advanced for her timeline. Through passages from her journals, Sylvia is painted as a soul trapped within itself and split in various directions. She spent her whole life pursuing greater pleasures and fruitful experiences, but because she held herself to such a high standard of being, she grew to feel lonely in her own skin. This goes hand in hand with the character description of Nora Seed we are provided, as they both craved to exist as so many things in such a short amount of time that they lost sight of what mattered to them. When you obsess over one specific goal for a long period, you lose your sense of purpose, and that obsession takes over your life. When Nora and Sylvia became obsessed with living in every possible way, they forced themselves to spend less time enjoying the small things and more time seeing the overall picture. Seeing everything in pure black and white is a recipe for disaster, as you are disabling your ability to appreciate the path that got you where you are now. Our “small details” make our overall picture more eye-catching and complete, as they allow us to properly appreciate the progress we’ve made.
ReplyDeleteI believe that our current society struggles with this, especially with the prevalence of social media. We are spoon-fed carefully crafted highlights of the lives around us and led to believe that’s how things should always be. We are cursed to live in fear of missing out on something, so we remain hypervigilant to changes in the energy around us. We form parasocial relationships with people who show the slightest similarities to ourselves, convinced that they have it figured out and will provide the guidance we need to evolve. We are always aware of new possibilities to get ourselves out there and model the false lives we witness on our screens. It is exhausting constantly trying to prove yourself to a world unaware of and unphased by your efforts, and I think that Sylvia (and Nora) figured that out far too late. We cannot simply be everything all at once. Trying to feel in all the shades, live through every season simultaneously, and exist in more than one state of being is impossible unless we acknowledge the path that got us here and the decisions we’ve made.
Responding to Set B:
ReplyDeleteIn my experience having a wide range of desires and ambitions has proved valuable to my own life. So I agree when Plath mentions how she wants to live and feel everything she possibly can, I truly find myself in that statement. As a human being though I also agree with the first part of Plath’s statement, where she herself realizes she will never be able to live all the lives she desires for. I have had multiple desires and ambitions in my life, and I believe a person can take comfort in knowing that they can never out run their desires and imagination, I may never live all the lives I dream of, but I am happy knowing that I have enough imagination to go down a path to success.
Set B;
ReplyDeleteThe message Plath gives through the quote, in my eyes, seems to be communicating that life and desire don't always work out together. That her desires are too massive for her life, yet she wants. Meaning, even though she might not experience all she wants to experience in her life, those desires will never go away. Plath doesn't seem to want them to, because having so many desires isn't a hindrance and in my personal opinion helps humanity go their furthest. In this day and age, our wildest ambitions seem unfeasible due to costs of education and shelter so we settle for what we believe we want in that moment, but years from now, when we're all elderly, we will say the same exact thing our grandparents said—"I wish I did more."
-Briana Grigg
Set B
ReplyDeleteI can relate to Plath's quote about life and desire. For context I attended an engineering tech school for half of my day during high school (meaning I went to my tech school for half the day and then I went to my normal high school for the other half). I specifically remember moping to my mom one day after school about all the different types of careers I learned about that day. I remember saying something along the lines of “wow mom, there are so many cool things that I could do but I only get to pick one”, which is basically a high school freshman version of the first line of Plath’s quote. I was sad because I wanted to do many jobs/careers, but I am probably only going to be able to do only 1 or 2. I think that having a wide range of desires and ambitions are important to thrive in life because they can help narrow down exactly what we want to do. If we are able to find and do exactly what we want to do, we will thrive in life. For example, at the time I was enthralled by materials engineering. Materials engineers work to create new materials to solve problems, such as reducing costs or improving the functionality of an already existing material. Unfortunately, I realized that this job required a lot of chemistry, and I absolutely hate chemistry. If I were to go down this path and be surrounded by chemistry all of the time, I would be miserable and although the end product would be cool, I would not thrive in life. What I did learn from this was that although materials engineering was not for me, I did want to be in a career where I can make something to help people. Additionally, I have other desires and ambitions that have combined with my learning experience with materials engineering to help lead me to what I think will help me thrive in life- data science.
I do think that people in our society more often fail to dream big. I don’t really hear a lot of big dreams so I would have to assume that people are being realistic when they talk about their dreams. However, they could also just be being modest for the sake of small talk.
Camden Wilmes
Supposedly, Sylvia Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry, sources documenting her reception of a Pulitzer Prize. It was only after I had read through an archived New York Times article that I realized, with substantial shock, she had received this Pulitzer Prize 19 years after her suicide. There are many instances of awards coming posthumously to artists, often shortly after their deaths or a year or so after. What had shocked me was not only that it was awarded to her 19 years after her death, but that her cause of death was suicide. I thought to myself, why? Of course, I knew the answer: though I don't entirely align with the notion that all great art comes from great suffering, I do believe that great suffering brings great responses which create great art. But to see a poet take their life at such an early stage of it was crushing. Part of me wondered if, knowing my own personal battles, I'd be met with the same fate.
ReplyDeleteThen I realized, after reading the back cover of this book, what it's about.
From judging the spine and arms of this book alone, I could deduce the reason Sylvia Plath was quoted. After spiraling into depression and receiving various means of faulty treatment from those around her, Sylvia had decided to end her suffering.
The book opens with Sylvia Plath because it is about human existence and the weight of choices. Sylvia Plath is someone who had suffered tremendously under the weight of her own mental illness and how it worsened the already cruel world around her, and eventually chose to cut the wire of her misery. The Midnight Library, with this quote, is asking us to enter the seat of those who reject their lives, who are shrouded in miseries uncommon to the layman and ask the reader, "What is the value of life? What is the value of your life? What if you could choose your life?"
It was only when I flipped to the next page, reading "Nineteen Years Later," that I realized how much deeper those themes ran.
(originally written much earlier to this post. circa the first Honors Social)
Part B
ReplyDeleteAs I learn more from both reading about Sylvia Plath and from the book I am beginning to greatly appreciate the idea of being at a constant cross roads as Nora is in the Midnight Library. Much of the book focuses on how each of the various paths that have lead all the Noras to their different destinations that may or may not entail happiness are often are very different than what she initially thought it would be. However, I like that the prologue takes a moment to appreciate being in the center of all of these choices and being able to take a dip and bask in the shadow of all the possibilities available to us, something that Nora is slow to realize.
The significance of the quote is that it is non fictitious in contrast to the fictional story. Not to say that the book is not about real life but it is easy to read of a fictional library and not realize that that library is for many of us the present. For me the quote bridged the gap between the midlife crises of 35 year old and all the possibilities that a young freshman in college has. It does a very good job of helping explain the concept of the library and calls to attention that we are all at this moment looking into our future as Nora is looking into her past and constantly changing our present priorities to find, or in our case write, the book that she wants to pull off the shelf.
Part A:
ReplyDeleteBy incorporating a reference to Plath at the beginning of a book, The writer gives a hint at the story to come. I had not heard of Silvia Plath previously, so after reading the opening citation I assumed she was simply someone who wanted to maximize the use of her life. After some research though, I realized that she spoke from a darker state of mind, more akin to a depression in which she could never do all that she wished, which were all the things she assumed would make her life worthwhile, rather than a perspective of redeeming her time. By opening with this quote, Matt Haig sets a melancholy mood that persists into the opening scenes of the story.
Responding to Part B, I feel as though it is human desire to have many many desires of accomplishment in life, but not setting a realistic standard or accepting that some accomplishments cannot be leads to disappointment. Plath communicates this desire to live and accomplish every desire she has, but starts with the realistic statement of "I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want." There is simply not enough time and one must accept that reality. People in our society are allowed to dream, they must simply come to terms that there are things that cannot be. Furthermore, one must always strive to live for oneself and not pursue the dreams others have set for them.
ReplyDelete-Sam Ray
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