{"id":2137,"date":"2011-04-15T23:32:31","date_gmt":"2011-04-15T23:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2137"},"modified":"2011-04-15T23:32:31","modified_gmt":"2011-04-15T23:32:31","slug":"the_fig_tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2011\/04\/15\/the_fig_tree\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fig Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve never read Sylvia Plath, but I recently came across a passage from her novel The Bell Jar<\/i> in, of all places, an article on New York’s famed Barbizon Hotel for Women<\/a> in a year-old copy of Vanity Fair<\/i> magazine. This passage struck a chord with me, strongly enough that I want to record it someplace, if not share it with others. I admire the craftsmanship of this paragraph, the strong imagery that so clearly illustrates a fairly nebulous idea. It”s a level of writing to which I aspire. <\/p>\n

The thing that really gets me, though, is how strongly the passage resonates with some thoughts I’ve been having lately. I have no idea what the context is here, or even what The Bell Jar<\/i> is about. But this single image, shorn of plot and standing all on its own, is powerful stuff that I find myself relating to, regretfully more than is entirely comfortable…<\/p>\n

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the
\nstory. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful
\nfuture beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and
\nchildren, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a
\nbrilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and
\nanother fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig
\nwas Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with
\nqueer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady
\ncrew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I
\ncouldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig
\ntree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which
\nof the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but
\nchoosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to
\ndecide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they
\nplopped to the ground at my feet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve never read Sylvia Plath, but I recently came across a passage from her novel The Bell Jar in, of all places, an article on New York’s famed Barbizon Hotel for Women in a year-old copy of Vanity Fair magazine. This passage struck a chord with me, strongly enough that I want to record it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-bookshelf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}