Robert Frost

The Poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I –

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Recently, a new friend invited me to tell him my “life’s story” and, of course, I was more than eager to oblige. As I told my tale, I felt as if I were a character in My Dinner with Andre, but later, when I’d left the restaurant, I realized that the man I had just described in nauseating detail was a mash-up of St. Augustine and Che Guevara. (Are we all just mash-ups of our heroes?)

Not that anything I told my friend was untrue. It was just that every story had been edited to emphasize the creative and the courageous at the expense of the bumbling and the befuddled. “It’s my story; I’ll tell it the way I want!”

Apparently, the extruded lives we think we live are more like braided twine. What passes for ‘a life’ is actually many lives woven together. For the most part, these different lives happily coexist and even reinforce one another…until we are forced to reduce them to a single, linear narrative. To narrate is to select and to order and thereby to destroy and distort. 

Of course, there’s a parallel here to Quantum Mechanics (QM). (Isn’t there always?) According to most interpretations of QM, the state of a physical system is unsettled until it is observed or measured. That way, Schrödinger’s cat can be both alive and dead…until Little Tommy Thin cruelly opens the box.

Until I am asked to tell my life story, I am many different people to myself and a different ‘different person’ to each person I encounter. Taken together, ‘I’ > 1 person. But when I narrate, I select the events I wish to include and the colors I wish to give them. The ‘narrated me’ can only be one person, and, because narrative is necessarily selective, the narrated me (ok, say it, just like the actual me) is always a few cents short of a dime (< 1 person).  

While we narrate effortlessly and almost unconsciously every minute of every day, the process is deceptively complex. We must first break down our undifferentiated stream of consciousness so that it discloses discrete events, then clothe each event with an appropriate subjective form (‘feeling’) and then link these events together so that what emerges has the degree of unity one needs if one is to be regarded as a ‘person’…and not locked up.

Sidebar: Even defining an event is a challenge. The Universe expresses itself solely in ‘events’ (logoi, words) so whatever I want to designate ‘an event’ has to possess the universal characteristics that define events per se. 

However, if I plan to include an event in a narrative, it also has to be expressible in a language my interlocutors can understand. Much as I might like to tell my tale in Klingon, I couldn’t count on being understood outside the city limits of ‘the two Cambridges’. And if, God forbid, my interlocutor speaks only Indo-European languages, I’ll need to find a way to describe my event in terms of nouns, verbs and their modifiers.

Autobiography is the most difficult form of writing, and, in my opinion at least, it is rarely successful. Usually, what passes for autobiography is more slideshows, clippings and souvenirs than biography. A narrative is not so much a succession of events with a variety of aspects as it is one single event fusing innumerable overlapping aspects into one overarching superject. Like DNA! Each base pair is a ‘bit’; coding for phenotypical traits is distributed throughout the genome.

Narrative is teleology: the tail wags the dog. ‘And they lived happily ever after (or not)’ is already embedded in ‘once upon a time’. In narrative, I am now and always have been what I will someday become.  (Could anything be more alien from real-life experience?) As a newborn lying helplessly in my crib, I am also the ‘fierce warrior’ I became (in my mind) and the ancient ‘drooling husk’ I am today.

When my friend asked for the story of my life, there were many different versions of myself I might have shared. There’s the ‘always anxious, socially awkward’ version you know. Then there are the ‘calculating, manipulative sociopath’ and the ‘hardworking family man’ versions. 

But of course, without thinking, I chose the ‘creative intellectual and courageous revolutionary’ option. After all, that’s the version best calculated to entertain. So what if it happened to paint me in my most preferred colors? Everyone likes a good swashbuckler, and I can write one as well as the next guy! (Well, actually, I can’t…but saying so wouldn’t read as well.)

The version of myself I decided to share with my friend is the one that best reflects the values that I wish had governed my life and that I now wish to ‘superject’ into your world: duck and cover! When I tell my story, I naturally invest that story with those values. Had I different values now, I would tell a different story. But would I have lived a different life? 

It is clear from the text of the poem that Frost had adopted non-conformity as a value. What makes The Road Not Taken such an existential triumph, however, is that in this poem, Frost admits that these values are adopted and that adopted values provide the subjective form of his life and constitute his persona.

In other words, in classic existentialist prose, “We choose the person we are to be.” Frost imagines himself a taker of roads less traveled; it’s a crucial piece of his identity, i.e. who he is to himself. But the text itself tells a very different story: “…The passing there had worn them both about the same, and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.”  IRL, there is no road less traveled; one path is no more, or less, ‘adventurous’ than the other. 

Frost recognizes that, objectively speaking, there is no difference between these roads; still, subjectively, it is important for him to seem to be choosing the less popular option. Like me (above), Frost knows he’ll have to tell this story years later, and he wants his story to reflect his adopted values, not just his lived life.

Perhaps Frost means to go even further. Perhaps he is suggesting that all of life’s potential paths lie equally before us. And why not? Each of us can only take one sequence of ways, and none of us will ever have traveled any of those ways before, so aren’t all paths the same to us? They’re just paths and we are just ‘such entities as paths are made for’. 

Nor are we likely to revisit any of those paths. “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted I should ever come back.” Therefore, in a certain sense, the paths before us must always lie equally. To paraphrase Heraclitus, we never walk the same path twice. And since we can’t reliably predict a book’s contents from its cover, all paths are pure potentiality…until we actualize one version of one.

But what if it turns out that the roads are not evenly worn after all? What if Frost was right in the first place? Is he now saying that at the core, it just doesn’t matter? Whether the path is a federal superhighway or a virgin trail hacking its way through the Amazon makes no difference?

Gertrude Stein might offer, “A road is a road is a road.” Stephen Hawking could opine, “Roads have no hair.” Truly, we only know three things about these roads: (1) they diverge from one another at forks; (2) they converge with one another at a common destination; and (3) we have no idea, really, what we will encounter along the way. On one road, ‘there may be dragons’…but we have no idea on which.  

The development of psychoanalysis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries presents us with a different and perhaps more comforting model. According to this view, our decisions are conditioned, or even determined, by our prior experiences. 

In some sense, then, we are not responsible for those decisions; they are determined for us. My parents are to blame for all my bad decisions - writing this article, for example - not me. “The sins of the parents…” and all that jazz.

This notion resurfaced in the latter half of the 20th century as Postmodernism. We do not act: our race, our gender, our class acts through us. 

20th century Existentialism poses a radical challenge to both these ‘devil made me do it’ ideologies: No decisions are ever determined or conditioned or even influenced. If they were, they wouldn’t be decisions at all, would they? 

A ‘decision’, from the Latin for ‘to cut’, must be a clean and complete rupture of the continuum. It must be a totally free act; otherwise it would be importing foreign influences. 

And for the same reason, the ‘cut’ must be decisive: it can leave no trace of the prior connection. The scientific notion of cause and effect, for example, does not qualify as decisive. By definition, the present affects a continuum of past and future and allows traces of each to be manifest at every now. “Causality is hegemony!”

Responsibility for an act rests solely with the one who decides it. (Hint: that’s not your parents, even if you were helicoptered!) If we seem to choose but then tell ourselves that there were reasons, or even causes, for our choices, then we didn’t choose after all; we just executed a decision made elsewhere. Or perhaps there was no proper decision at all. We stretched, weakened and frayed the cord but we did not cut it. 

When we avoid responsibility for making choices, we either credit those choices to external agencies or we accept the fact that no choices are made. Either way, we are guilty of what an existentialist would call ‘bad faith’. “To justify is to alibi!” 

But if decisions are never determined or even conditioned, are they just random? If so, if each choice is unrelated to any other choices, have we not drifted into nihilism? Robert Frost avoids bad faith by admitting that the paths “equally lay”. But he also avoids nihilism by attributing his decisions only to values he has freely chosen. Transcendent influence, yes, foreign influence, no!

What ultimately gives meaning to Frost’s life is not the choices he makes, but the narrative that connects those choices. It is that narrative that projects his chosen values, theoretically, into the future. ‘Frost’ is not really the sequence of the decisions he makes; he is the narrative he weaves using values as his thread.  

Frost’s ‘superject’, the footprint he impresses on the world, is the ‘subjective form’ of his life’s narrative…turned inside out. And that ‘subjective form’, of course, consists entirely of the values Frost adopted. Anyone can go for a walk in the woods but only Frost can walk this way.  

‘Frost’ is like a switching station; he selectively adopts values from his ‘actual world’ and he projects those same values, reconfigured via a novel narrative, into the actual worlds of others. 

‘Frost’ is like a virus; he ‘infects’ concrete events (parent cells) with his genes (values), thereby ensuring that those values will pass on into the actual worlds of future events (daughter cells).

Being is good; it is Potentiality for Value. Non-being is the absence of that potentiality. Being (or doing) ‘good’ is a matter of projecting Value. (Note: all values are ‘good’. What is ‘not good’ is the absence or diminution of Value.) How simple is that? 

God’s ultimate contribution to the consequent world is his weaving of each and every unique story into a single Universal narrative. That meta-narrative has God’s primordial values as its unadulterated subjective form. This is where the theological notion of judgment comes into play. 

Just as I must pare down my many selves to one self, so God must meld our ‘many worlds’ into a single Universe. As far as is ontologically possible, God does this inclusively. Potentially destructive conflicts are harmonized into enriching contrasts.  This is ‘divine mercy’ – that God saves whatever can be saved. 

The divine nature defines the absolute limit of harmonic inclusion. Nevertheless, even God cannot make a stone too heavy for him to lift, i.e. even God cannot harmonize irreconcilables. Realistically, certain parts of certain narratives probably won’t make it into the ‘final edition’ and this is the solution to the Problem of Evil – it’s what’s left on the cutting room floor.

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.

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