clipped from: roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com   
Sylvia Plath
Suicide is humbling for us, the observers
What we know most about is the horror of suicide, for the agent, for the survivors.

We are often drawn to characters who seem to be exemplars of the inexorability of fate, of destiny. And they were such. In their lives, in their work, they seemed to express the darkest workings of the unconscious.

Sylvia Plath wrote about depression so explicitly and so beautifully in “The Bell Jar,” where she described how:

I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

For anyone who has been depressed, that description rings astonishingly true. She had talent and looks and was married to a great poet, but these externals cannot assuage that eye-of-the-storm despair.