Sylvia Plath’s Arrow

I thought, again, about what Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar—just that little bit of conversation between characters where Esther claims a man “is an arrow into the future” and a woman “is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

I think about this often.

I have never been able to fully grasp Plath’s meaning.  For that reason, I cannot cast aside the arrow.

—Mitchell Hegman