The Journals of Sylvia Path

Still as I read them I hear a questioning vibrant voice so like my own that it feels as if she were in my head voicing my thoughts - laying aside the obvious difference that I'm not a teenage girl at college in the USA in the 1950s. It's the questioner behind the voice, the "I" behind the questioning that I identify with so much. It's the way that she leaps on things and experience that surround her and uses those as the focus for her exploration of who, what, why she is. You can feel the patina of adolescence in her writings, coloring the choice of subject and experience - there's a lack of world weariness and length in her experience, but still she comes across as so alive and spirited and so aware of the way she is wrapped up in her own environment and life, always aware that she is this teenage american girl at college and how limited that scope of experience must be, but always seeking to burst out of those confines. It's almost impossible to think that she committed suicide and yet in other ways it is so understandable in that that fierce sensitivity, that intense knowledge of her own limitations are the seeds of the despair that must have eroded her self-belief and her strength. Because with great insight goes a vulnerability that can be hugely difficult to bear - when she pours out her feelings about the atomic bombs and Korea it's not just a rant , it's a heart rending apprehension of the vast damage that is being done, and her insignificance in it, but her complicity too, part of this amazing country that is so incredibly powerful.

"They're really going to mash the world up this time, the damn fools. When I read that description of the victims of Nagasaki I was sick..."

Journals , p46