I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

A bad dream.To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.A bad dream.I remembered everything.I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.But they were part of me. They were my landscape

In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

I am myself. That is not enough.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.