Sarah aesthetics, book, quote

The Bell Jar

Then Doctor Nolan unlocked a door at the end of the hall and led me down a flight of stairs into the mysterious basement corridors that linked, in an elaborate network of tunnels and burrows, all the various buildings of the hospital.

The walls were bright, white lavatory tile with bald bulbs set at intervals in the black ceiling. Stretchers and wheelchairs were beached here and there against the hissing, knocking pipes that ran and branched in an intricate nervous system along the glittering walls. I hung on to Doctor Nolanā€™s arm like death, and every so often she gave me an encouraging squeeze.

Finally, we stopped at a green door with Electrotherapy printed on it in black letters. I held back, and Doctor Nolan waited. Then I said, ā€œLetā€™s get it over with,ā€ and we went in.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Sarah aesthetics, book, quote

Tunnels | Girl, Interrupted

It was a typical December day in the Boston area: tin-colored clouds spitting bits of rain mixed with flat watery snowflakes and just enough wind to make you wince.

ā€œTunnels,ā€ said the nurse.

Out the double-locked double doors and down the stairs as usualā€”our ward was on the second floor for added security. There were many doors in the hallway, one of which went outside. The nurse opened another one, and we went down a second flight of stairs. Then we were in the tunnels.

First their wonderful smell: They smelled of laundry, clean and hot and slightly electrified, like warmed wiring. Then their temperature: eighty at a minimum, and this when it was thirty-three outside, probably twenty-five with wind chill (though in the innocent sixties, wind chill, like digital time, hadnā€™t yet been discovered). Their quavery yellow light, their long, yellow-tiled walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings, their forks and twists and roads not taken, whose yellow openings beckoned like shiny open mouths. Here and there, on white tiles embedded in the yellow, were signposts: CAFETERIA, ADMINISTRATION, EAST HOUSE.