My name is Alison. (I’m pretty sure this constitutes enough to officially declare you know me, and so we might as well call ourselves friends. Okay, okay. I leaped over the line. Cyber acquaintances.)
I decided to start this blog because who doesn’t have a blog in the twenty-first century? And I must fit in for fear of being rejected from our prosperous society. Besides, a pen and paper I have decided are just a complete and utter overkill when you have the click, click of your keyboard beneath the reach of your finger tips and personally speaking, anything I write usually ends up in the bin, under my bed or buried at the end of my schoolbag.
I’m going to reveal a little more about myself as I’m feeling generous. The very words you scrutinize(if you know me) or skip(if you don’t know me, I won’t take offense) are typed from a red-bricked house lost in a cluster of green fields in Southern Ireland. Exciting times. And so we conclude I’m Irish…
But it’s not my biography, but my blog, so I’m going to move on to today.
I finally obtained my own copy of Sylvia Plath’s only published novel The Bell Jar. Why this day hasn’t come sooner I will never know seeing as I have probably have read it six or seven times since I first borrowed it from one of my bestfriends called Anna, whose copy had personality and history to it… All of the pages were soft to touch, brown in age while others had fallen out from the spine of the book, defeated by time. It was tattered and venerable but nevertheless wonderful in its own right and led me to a budding fascination of the author and poet, Sylvia Plath. 
“I feel very still and very empty, the way the eye of the tornado must feel”
is definitely the first of many lines that grabbed me, not only emotionally but physically. It was as though Sylvia’s words stretched from the book itself and punched me in the stomach and left a sickly feeling to sit there. Quite often in conversational and everyday speech we use the word very for emphasis on a certain feeling… Its synonyms(yes.. I just used autocorrect to spell synonym) include extremely, exceedingly, tremendously, immensely… The list goes on. Yet what strikes me about this particular line is the monotonous repetition of the word very twice. Plath deliberately chose to use the word twice, to show the repetitious and wearisome manner that life sometimes follows causing us to feel that stillness and emptiness. Although the world may be bustling around us, it may be not be congruent with our needs and wishes. The world is the tornado, and we are the eye.
Allie's corner 