“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them … I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near on to an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again … New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don’t know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure … The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft, white, hotel-bath towels I felt pure and sweet as a new baby.” —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
