There’s No Telling

IF READERS HOLD ON to one image from the poetry of Robert Frost, it’s that of two branching paths—one that has been trampled, the other relatively unkempt and uncharted. That famous distinction, though, comes later; in fact, the speaker relates in the moment, “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” His insistence, then, that he “took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” doesn’t track—at least not in the actual, decision-making present. As Katherine Robinson explains, it is “the act of assigning meanings—more than the inherent significance of events themselves—[that] defines our experience of the past.” In other words, Frost only recognizes the road as “less traveled by” in retrospect; similarly, it’s in looking back that he decides it “has made all the difference.” This double statement of autonomy—I chose, and my choice mattered—is confident in its own nostalgic (potentially baseless) truth, highlighting the chasm between the certainty of hindsight and the doubts of the moment at hand.