Quote of the Day: Sylvia Plath on Life & Mortality

Notice Plath’s choice of “born” instead of merely “returns.” “Returns” would imply the world is a static set waiting patiently offstage. “Born” is hotter, riskier, and more personal: it suggests creation, not retrieval. With that one word, she turns a blink into a kind of genesis: “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”

Read it as a reminder that your attention is not passive, it’s an instrument. When you withdraw it, your world really does collapse in practice: the email becomes noise, the relationship becomes background, the day becomes a blur. When you lift your eyes with intention, you don’t just notice what’s there; you re-author it. The same room can feel like a cage or a workshop depending on what you allow yourself to see.

There’s also a quiet instruction for hard days. If everything feels “dead,” it may not be proof that life is empty, it may be proof that your awareness is exhausted. Closing your eyes can be rest, not escape. And reopening them can be a deliberate act of resilience: not forcing happiness, but granting the world one more chance to present itself freshly.

Sylvia Plath earned her enduring place through razor-precise confessional poetry and the novel The Bell Jar, works that map the inner life with uncommon clarity. Her lines carry credibility because they were written by someone who treated perception as both a craft and a confrontation.

Today, try a ten-second rebirth: pause before your next task, close your eyes, take one slow breath, then open them and name three details you usually miss. Let that small act of mindfulness be your beginning again, and may your day come back to life in your hands.