Belzhar Read Online Free PDF Page B

bed, and not have to deal with this odd, new environment and all these people with problems.
    “All right, thank you,” says Mrs. Quenell, as if she’d barely noticed before now that her choice of book and writer, at a school like this, is kind of unusual. Marc is right; suicide has to be a touchy issue here. A lot of students at The Wooden Barn are probably depressed. But it’s almost as if Mrs. Quenell were going right for the gut by picking Sylvia Plath. It’s like she’s doing whatever she wants, because she doesn’t care what people think of her. And for the quickest second, I’m almost impressed.
    “If anyone’s feelings change,” she goes on, “please come talk to me. I chose the curriculum with care. Just the way I chose all of you.”
    Maybe she did choose us with care. But who knows how the choices were made. None of us in the class seem to have much in common.
    “For those of you who aren’t familiar with
The Bell Jar
,” she says, “it was written over fifty years ago by the brilliant American writer Sylvia Plath. The book is autobiographical, and it tells the story of a young woman’s depression and, I suppose, her descent into madness. Does anyone know what a bell jar is?” We shake our heads. “It’s a bell-shaped glass jar used for scientific samples. Or to create a little vacuum. Anything that’s put under a bell jar is isolated from the rest of the world,” she says. “It’s a metaphoric title, of course. Sylvia Plath, whose depression made her feel as if she herself were in a kind of bell jar, cut off from the world, took her own life at age thirty.”
    No one says anything; we just listen. “This is the one novel she wrote in her lifetime. She was a very fine and accomplished poet, and she wrote some of her most powerful work—the poems in her collection
Ariel
—at the end of her life. We’ll be reading them, too, of course. Oh, and she also happened to be a prolific keeper of journals over the years. Which is why,” she says, “I’m also giving you
these.
”
    Mrs. Quenell reaches below the table again and pulls out a stack of five identical red leather journals, passing them around. When I get mine I open it and the book makes a slight creaking sound, its spine tight. It’s a well-made object, I can tell at once, and it’s also clearly very old, the pages slightly yellowed, as if it’s been sitting in a box in a closet for decades. The pale blue lines on the paper are closer together than I’m used to, and I know that I’d have to write a lot to fill up even one page.
    “Whoa, this is an antique,” says Griffin.
    “Yes. Just like your teacher,” says Mrs. Quenell with a smile. She folds her hands and looks at us. “For tonight,” she continues, “in addition to reading the first chapter of
The Bell Jar
, you will also begin thinking about keeping your own journal. Try to imagine what you might write. Begin writing, if you can. But at the very least, think about it. It’s your journal, it belongs to you, and it will be a representation of you and your inner life. You can write anything you like.”
    But all I can think is, sarcastically,
ooh, how exciting
. Because there’s nothing I want to write. I’m hardly going to put down on paper the things I think about all the time, night and day. The person I think about. That’s only for me.
    “Once the spirit moves you,” says Mrs. Quenell, “you will write in the journal twice a week. And you will all hand your journals back to me at the end of the semester. I won’t read them, I never do, but I
will
collect them, and keep them. Like the writing itself, this is a requirement. I’m a firm believer in my students moving forward and not dwelling on what might be less than productive.” She takes a moment, then says, “You will be doing close reading all semester, and also what I call close writing. And you will all be asked to participate in class discussions. Some days this will be harder than others, no