Page 125 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you
confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—
because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

6.

So: Sylvia Plath. In her thinly disguised autobiography, The Bell Jar, Plath’s protagonist, Esther
Greenwood, describes her descent into madness. And she thinks about suicide precisely as Ronald
Clarke (who made the link between town gas and suicide) suggests she would. She is incredibly
sensitive to the question of how she’ll take her own life. “If you were going to kill yourself, how
would you do it?” Esther asks Cal, a young man she’s lying next to on a beach.
Cal seemed pleased. “I’ve often thought of that. I’d blow my brains out with a gun.” I was
disappointed. It was just like a man to do it with a gun. A fat chance I had of laying my hands on
a gun. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have a clue as to what part of me to shoot at.
That very morning Esther had tried to hang herself with the silk cord of her mother’s bathrobe,
and it hadn’t worked. “But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears
and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.”
She and Cal swim for the shore. She decides to try to drown herself—and dives for the bottom of
the sea.
I dived and dived again, and each time popped up like a cork.
The gray rock mocked me, bobbing on the water easy as a lifebuoy.
I knew when I was beaten.
I turned back.
Plath’s protagonist wasn’t looking to kill herself. She was looking for a way to kill herself. And
not just any method would do. That’s the point of coupling: behaviors are specific. She needed to
find a method that fit. And on that cold February night, the method that fit for Sylvia Plath
happened to be right there in her kitchen.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
This is “A Birthday Present,” written in September 1962, at the beginning of Plath’s anguished
final months in London:
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles…

Take a look at the following graph showing suicide rates from 1958 to 1982 for British women
ages twenty-five to forty-four. (Plath was thirty when she died.)