No Difference

Joseph Carlson
MSMU Class of 2025

(3/2022) Philip Gerber claimed that "For thousands Robert Frost remains the only recent poet worth reading and the only one who matters." The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost, seems to have defined a generation of Americans seeking originality. My heterodox opinion on the piece, then, might offend some, and hopefully refresh others. The Road Not Taken is actually not about how the speaker made the correct choice in taking a different road than the rest of men; rather it is about how it made no difference.

The poem is worth its own read and many more, so I will not simply summarize it, and let you read it yourself.

The Paris Review has deemed The Road Not Taken "the most misread poem in America," roughly for the same reason I will articulate now. The first line is as follows: "two roads diverged in a yellow wood." It must be noticed that both paths which he is contemplating going down are in the exact same forest! He admits that both paths are "just as fair." The only difference the entire time was that he took the path that had been less traveled. And contemplating, he remarks:

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.
Both paths, in truth, he says, were trod the same, and both paths, in truth, had not been trod.

The last iconic line is this:

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 traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The piece is perpetually touted as a triumph of self-assertion over the difficulties of life, like unto Frank Sinatra’s line, "I faced it all, and I stood tall, and did it my way." Yet, Frost’s remark that, "somewhere ages and ages hence" he shall have said that his taking the road less traveled had made all the difference, is simply a prediction, not his conviction. He feels that at the end of his life, he shall comfort himself with the same consolation that all men comfort themselves near death, that he at least lived his very own life, that he carved it out for himself, that he did it his way. But the roads were in fact the same. It is true, he took a road no other had traveled. Yet is this not true of all human beings? Who can say that he has lived another man’s life? We all are unique, and that uniqueness has little to do with our making it so. No one is actually capable of controlling how their life will turn out. Even should one be a member of the unlucky few who got to live life exactly as they wanted, with all the extravagancies of self-satisfaction, they still have to pay the debt that all men pay. Though they may console themselves with the ignorant view that they did it all themselves, they still die at the end of it all. And what happens to his accomplishments? In all likelihood, they will be forgotten eventually and will be worth nothing.

This should not be depressing. To point out the meaninglessness of human assertion for its own sake is noble, and necessary, so that we don’t preoccupy ourselves with useless efforts all our days, thinking that they were worth it. Flannery O’Connor, the great American author, devoted much of her career to exactly this idea. She said, "Everybody who has read [my work] thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist, whereas. . .I’m a hillbilly Thomist."

The nihilist looks at life and says that it is meaningless. The scholastic philosophy of Thomism, on the other hand, while agreeing that it doesn’t exactly make a difference whether you decided how your life turned out or not, it affirms the dignity, the importance of choosing the right thing regardless. It is not about the end product of your life, whether you asserted yourself, conquered suffering, or lived your ideal life. It is about the person you became along the way.

This is not to relegate all of human choice to meaninglessness; in fact, it is to posit that all human choice is imminently meaningful, whether one accomplishes what they wanted or not! The "at least I did it my way" outlook throws the life of the slave in the gutter. It has nothing to do with the consequences of a life lived. Rather, to be as human as possible, to live virtuously, to live only for the good of others, to be interiorly free – this is the goal of life. Frederick Douglas, the great abolitionist, and prolific author, spoke of the moment when his whole interior changed. Essentially, when he began to understand what I am now saying: "However long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact." The form our lives take on can change for so many reasons, many of which are out of our control. We can take any path we’d like; no matter what, we end up at the same place, either being free in the essence of who we are or having only our meaningless accomplishments to boast of. It must be noted that this quote is about a moment Douglas lived four years before he actually was freed from chattel slavery. This interior freedom, therefore, is meant for all human beings, whether they are living the path they chose for themselves or not.

Only Frost knows what he really meant in The Road Not Taken. He doesn’t offer us any solutions, only not to pursue difference for difference’s sake. What I am convinced of, though, is that we still can seek to be the most virtuous we can, no matter where the path of life takes us. That is an interior freedom offered to all human beings, and that makes all the difference.

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