Set the fig tree of life on fire and other lessons from Sylvia Plath

Sometimes, as an adult, you collide unexpectedly with your own adolescence. Without having time to prepare beforehand, the experience can be discombobulating, like a fighter taking a clean blow to the chin that he or she didn’t see coming and reeling across the ring.

It’s probably fair to say that if you knew these collisions were going to happen beforehand, you would make sure to avoid them. Stepping suddenly back into your youth can feel awfully like shrugging on an old jacket after years and years.

It pinches the arm flab you used not to have, and smells faintly of mildew and regret. It used to make you feel cool but now it makes you feel old and detached from yourself.

You become conscious of the chasm between then and now. You become aware that you have changed, possibly for the better. Possibly not. But your past self will always be composed mostly of potential, and that’s very hard to compete with when you’ve certainly let at least some of it atrophy and die away by now.

Introspective

My adolescent self was very struck when she read Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel, The Bell Jar. Taunt if you will. Plath's only novel is often pejoratively dismissed as the reading material of lachrymose teenage girls, which was rather a good fit for me.

It does have that aspect, but it’s also a beautifully written, introspective account of feeling ill at ease in the world.

Plath’s protagonist, Esther, is rather like a young Plath herself, and lots of young women – brimming with potential but struggling to figure out the best direction for it.

My eighteen-year-old self felt a thrumming recognition when Esther finds herself faced with a plethora of potential directions she could theoretically strive for in life, imagining all the options like figs on a tree.

“From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked . . . I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Yes, that is a little depressing, but we have a bad habit of idealising the choices we didn’t make over those we did, often forgetting the reasons we had at the time, like bad historians suffering from presentism in microcosm.

Of course, sometimes we just make mistakes and have to live with them, carrying that particular rotten fig around in a bag with us for years afterwards, but that too seems an inescapable aspect of adulthood. The smell of rotten fig is also a good reminder not to repeat a mistake.

Adolescent idiocy

My past collided with me when a yearning for quiet and scrambled eggs took me to a café in Dublin that I like. While I was finishing up some work, a handsome young man in a sharp suit called my name. I hadn’t seen him in more than 10 years. It was an old school friend who witnessed much of my adolescent idiocy, and with whom I later lost touch.

He’s a doctor now, and despite my remembering him as being fond of particularly hideous Hawaiian style shirts, he was even wearing a tie clip.

The void of time hung in the air over our heads, and I felt him seeing me as I was seeing him – a version of that teenager from whom we were both now so disconnected that I really felt the pinch of that mildewed jacket, even as I felt delighted to see him and hear the cadence of the Cork accent he hadn’t had when we were friends.

Afterwards, I felt glad to have seen him, partially because he told me that a mutual school friend we’d had, who was rather wild and something of a mess, and whom we had thought most likely to join a cult of some sort, was now a psychiatrist. Some people just set the fig tree on fire.