The Bell Jar: Chapters 1-4

...that's all there was to read about in the papers — goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway.

I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldn't get them out of my mind. It was like the first time I saw a cadaver.

I was exactly forty-three blocks by five blocks away from my hotel. Walking has never fazed me.

At first I thought the smoke had materialized out of thin air as a sort of judgment, but then I remembered it was Doreen's smoke and pushed the button that opened the window vent.

Arrayed on the Ladies Day banquet table were yellow-green avocado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise, and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a cut-glass bowl heaped with black caviar.

This poet ate his salad with his fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and art.

"My!" I said, in the same sepulchral tone. "That was quick!"

It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.

My German-speaking father, dead since I was nine, came from some manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia.

I think it flattered him that I enjoyed his classes so much I take them for no materialistic reason like credit and an A, but for the sheer beauty of chemistry itself.

Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheater, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test tube into another...

...and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.

...and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.

The remains of a tepid rain were still sifting down when we stepped out into the street.

My eyes moved tentatively to the skirt behind the cup.