The real meaning of the road not taken

Not just writers, but readers too

The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost, 1915

Sometimes I don’t know where to start. Will you wander in the woods with me? And I will get us lost with what mama used to call my goddamn insatiable curiosity, always getting me in trouble but look, there’s a little path and don’t you wonder what’s down there? Because I do, so let’s look and we’ll find our way into the sunshine again.

I’m trying to write a book and I don’t know if the agent I’m talking to will like it or if I’ll even manage to finish it but I hope so to both. It’s a strange little book about some women, narrated by Death because he is the only thing they all have in common.

He’s the only one that really saw them, when all was said and done.

And it is, said and done. At least for them.

It’s not sad, so you know. Not sad or grim or maudlin. That was the important part to me. It’s angry and funny. Tender and callous. But mostly? He reveres them. Looks at them with so much love. He sees their souls. Catches them gently, so tenderly.

He saves them, when the men who were supposed to didn’t.

Kafka once said a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside and I’m trying to sharpen my axe but as I sharpen and sharpen, I know that under the ice is a roaring, churning ocean and the tide is strong and I’m so afraid of drowning, you know?

But life is funny. Sometimes when you’re terrified of drowning it throws you a life raft and sometimes you grab it and realize it’s made of another writer’s words and of course because like Einstein said, life is either a miracle or it is nothing at all.

I will take all the miracles I can get because I refuse to believe life is nothing.

This morning I read a beautiful post by Dina called Stop All The Clocks. It’s about losing her father and you should absolutely read it and maybe buy her book for the measly $1.99 she’s selling it for, but in the post she says when they found out her father was dying, he said he’s had a good life and that sentence made me cry.

I don’t know what that means. A good life.

How are you to know when it’s so hard and so beautiful all at the same time?

Is it a good life when it’s never been much besides struggle but sometimes the beauty of it all stops you in your tracks. Like laughter. And birds. And hugs.

How are you supposed to know when you cry every day and sometimes it’s because life is hard and you’re so tired and other times it’s because look, the flowers are blooming in the snow and maybe I can too and someone loved my writing.

Like you wake up one day and realize you’re closer to sixty than fifty and the damn clock won’t stop ticking and the sand is trickling out the hourglass and you want to write the book but the client work needs doing because the bills need paying and you realize if you were a man you’d have earned tens of thousands more over the last thirty years of work and equality might not happen in your lifetime after all.

Me. Not you. Replace you with me.

Unless maybe it’s you, too.

But don’t look at that. Don’t think about that. Put it right out your head because it’ll eat you alive. Eat you for breakfast and spit out your bones. Life goes on.

How do you write about the one thing that plagues you and has always plagued you and probably always will plague you until the day death comes with open arms?

Toni Morrison answered that. If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. And I think about that wondering why the hell writing would pay my bills when it never has unless you count commercial copy written for clients with something for sale, but I keep on writing, don’t I?

Yes or no. Yay or nay. Keep writing or ditch it and I don’t know yet.

. . .

Do you know what the most recognized poem in the world is?

It starts like this…

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;

It was first published in the August 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

One hundred and eleven years ago.

And today? That poem and lines from it are searched four times more than any other text of the modernist era, according to Google insights. Lines from that poem have been used in advertising, borrowed by singers for their songs, and has provided episode titles for more than a dozen television series, apparently.

I read all that in an article in the Paris Review. It says in all American history, the only writers who have as much familiarity as Frost are Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe and the only English speaking poet more well-known than Frost is William Shakespeare.

And I read that and wanted to scream—

What about Emily Dickinson?

What about Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath?

What about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Audre Lorde? What about Mary Oliver?

Mary Oliver. Pulitzer prize for poetry. PEN award, Lannan Literary Award, National Book Award. Who wins the National Book Award for poetry? Mary Oliver, that’s who. But sure. Twain and Poe. I like their work, too. But it begs the question—

Where are the women’s names in a high profile publication like the Paris Review and while I rail inside, wondering when women’s names will come to mind as easily as mens’ I see death in the corner of my eye. Whispering that he’ll catch me gently.

I will not go willingly. I will fight to the last breath to hang on to this life.

I will rage, rage at the dying of the light and yes, it was a man who wrote that but I can love the words of a man without forgetting that women exist, can’t I? And I don’t know why the world can’t do this for women. How many years will it take?

And I don’t think I have enough years left to see that happen.

. . .

You know why we love that poem?

Because we think it means something it doesn’t.

We think it’s about the triumph of choice. We read it and see validation of our choices. We chose the road less travelled and oh my gosh, it made all the difference, right?

Here’s an ironic fact. You know what’s searched even more than the lines from Frost’s poem? The Road Less Traveled. That’s what people think it says. They think it’s about the road “less” travelled. But it doesn’t say that.

It says the road not travelled.

Which sounds pedantic, but it’s not.

Robert Frost’s poem was a commentary on self deception. It was about how we fool ourselves because it’s easier to just stay on the path than to go back and start over.

Literary critic Frank Lentricchia called it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

It’s all right there. In the beginning, he says both paths were “just as fair.” He didn’t say one path was less travelled. They were both just as fair, so he looked at them both and made a choice. And he says he marked the other “for another day.”

But you know how life goes. We pick a path and it’s easier to just keep on going that to go back to some fork in the road and take a new path. Just keep going.

Once you know that, the entire poem reads differently.

. . .

I read another post this morning. A writer I’ve read for years runs two publications on Substack. One about writing. The other is basically politics. Titles that include loaded words like Trump, Trump, Liberals and Ukraine. Anti-American and more Trump.

One publication is dying. Bleeding readers every day. Paid subscriptions dwindled to such a low she said she’s embarrassed to say how little it earns.

And the other? Growing like crazy. So she’s wondering if she should put the dying one out of its misery and just shut it down. I wish I could tell you it’s the publication about writing that’s growing. That on a website for writers, it’s words that captivate us.

But that would be lying. Because it’s not.

It’s the political one that’s growing.

And of course because the two primal desires that drive everything we humans do and respond to are pain and pleasure and pain screams louder and there’s no shortage of it in the world right now, is there?

I read another post this morning lamenting that people mistake talking about politics for action and feel like they are doing something, when they’re not really and the story was told through the lens of some Netflix series I haven’t watched.

It’s not wrong. But also? It gets clicks. Sometimes that’s the point.

Because who cares about dead women when bombs are falling on live people? Who cares about literature or philosophy when the Epstein files still aren’t all released?

I don’t have any answers. Not even for myself, let alone anyone else.

All I know is that we are all standing at a fork in the road.

We choose every time we click. We choose every time we decide whose work gets read and whose doesn’t. And as we click and choose, it affects what exists for us to choose from and that might look like a writer deciding to keep going, or turn back.

And I’m not saying what anyone should and should not read or support, so you understand because that’s not my job or anyone’s to say. Life is short and we should all read and support whatever we want, whatever speaks to us in the minute.

Mostly I’m just observing that sometimes we choose the path and other times the path chooses us. As always, love to know what you think…

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