The serious Sylvia was agonizing over the execution of the Rosenbergs and McCarthyism; others were delighting to dream over trousseau lingerie at Vanity Fair’s showroom.

I’ve lived long enough to know that life doesn’t always stick to the rules... The perfectly impossible and absolutely ridiculous keep happening all the time.

She was restless. She drove a little too fast, swam a little too far offshore. She hitchhiked. She skied recklessly. While Sylvia’s rabid perfectionism was very real, she was far from the good-girl persona she worked so hard to cultivate.

It was stories like these that would stun Miller into silence, bury him alive with desire to save her. He called her “the saddest girl in the world,” which she accurately interpreted as a statement as love.

However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which “rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future”. That was Sylvia’s genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.

Perhaps some guest editors would keep Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in their peripheral vision. But Sylvia recognized their execution as the most extreme and gruesome example of McCarthy’s red-baiting paranoia.

Life happens so fast and furiously that there is hardly any time to assimilate it.

For years I wondered what was her curious power, her ability to attract all kinds of people to her and to use them for her own ends, often with their knowledge. i think it was that people liked watching and being with someone who enjoyed life as much as Sylvia seemed to enjoy it. She squeezed all the juice from the orange, or, to change the figure, drained the cup to the leaves, the very dregs.

I've lived long enough to know that life doesn't always stick to the rules...The perfectly impossible and absolutely ridiculous keep happening all the time.

Out of the blue Sylvia said, ‘People are like boxes. You would like to open them up and see what’s inside, but you can’t.’ Sylvia was interested in people and recognizing how individuals create their own kind of camouflage- the ‘lids on the boxes’, so to speak.