The Myths We Tell Ourselves

(source)

A high school friend moved to New York around the same time that I did. I knew her in school as an aspiring actress with flair for the dramatic and an unquenchable passion for musical theater. So it came as no surprise to learn she had come to New York City to enroll in an intensive theater program and begin her career on the stage. 

What did surprise me was how, as we reminisced about our teenage years half a decade and half a country away, she described herself. She said, “Vernon, you were the funny kid in our class and I was the spooky kid.” 

Now, her description of teenaged me was correct, but I felt so taken aback by her self-assessment that I nearly put my hand on her shoulder and said, “You weren’t spooky.” But I didn’t. Because even though I have a clear vision of my friend as a teenaged fledgling thespian – and I checked with a few old friends and they remembered her the same way – I knew that my perspective was unimportant. The story of being a “spooky” kid placed more emphasis on her withdrawn and moody and brooding presence off stage, and truth of the story is less important than the way it helped her make sense of her self and her past. It is one of the many myths that we tell ourselves. 

We all subscribe to myths this sort. They may be true. They may be fictional. But the truth of the tale is irrelevant. What matters is that these myths define our understandings of ourselves. 

This idea of personal myth is central to Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”, arguably the most quoted, most misquoted, and most misinterpreted poem in the English language. It is a quintessentially American poem in the way that misinterpretations uphold a classically American identity myth.

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, as 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 if 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 traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

The common interpretation of “The Road Not Taken” (often wrongly titled “The Road Less Traveled”) considers to poem to be, in the words of poetry columnist David Orr, a “paean to triumphant self-assertion”¹. In this view, the narrator is faced with the simple choice of a fork in the road. Should I take this path on the left or the path on the right? Everything hinges on this decision! This is a moment of agency, when I take command of my fate and choose my path. 

But the details of the poem are at odds with this interpretation. The valiant frontiersman narrating our poem calls each path “just as fair” as the other, notes that they’re both “really about the same”, and says that the two paths “that morning equally lay”. Thus, how can we really know which path was less traveled? And how can we say whether that was really the path our narrator took? And so how can we really know what difference the choice made? Really, we can’t; I’ll let David Orr comment on that though:

“…the speaker will be claiming ‘ages and ages hence’ that his decision made ‘all the difference’ only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.”

I believe there is value in this interpretation of Frost’s poem for two reasons. First is the way it grapples with the anxiety of choice. I find myself considering this interpretation in my painfully introspective moments. Would I have been happy if I hadn’t have moved? Would I be more successful if I had chosen a different school? What would have happened if I had taken a different path? Oddly, the idea that no path would have actually made a difference comforts me, brings me back to the present out of anxious recollections. It removes, to a certain degree, the ever-present pressure to make the correct choice. 

The second way Orr’s interpretation is valuable is the way it reveals a myths we tell ourselves. It prompts us to ask, what other self-deception do we practice when constructing the story of our own lives? This tale of self-determination is not the only pervasive myth. At times, I find myself falling into the myth of “the one that got out” – the idea that I managed to escape a culturally deficient small town and make it to the big city. Yet, I didn’t make it “out” on my own drive or genius or talent, I had supportive friends, teachers, and parents. I had a relatively privileged upbringing and I knew how to apply to college. Besides, that town wasn’t that culturally deficient anyway and the people who stayed there aren’t trapped.

There are poems to be written on these myths. I wonder if Frost discovered that the myth behind the “The Road Not Taken” had shaped his sense of self and penned the poem accordingly. Consider, reader, what myths you may have been telling yourself. Do you, like Frost, subscribe to this myth of agency? Do you, like me, subscribe to a myth of escape? Or do you, like my friend, subscribe to a personal history of being “spooky”? Assess your own myths. There is poetry fodder within.  

1. David Orr, The Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/

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