DE Weekly: Frost, Jaspers, & The Road Not Taken
Below is an archived email originally sent on February 17, 2025.
Frost, Jaspers, & The Road Not Taken
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both”, wrote Robert Frost in his 1915 poem, “The Road Not Taken”.
These lines begin the first stanza of one of Frost’s most famous poems, one you’ve likely heard before.
The poem describes someone coming to a fork in the road, unsure of which path to take. The speaker is unsure of what lies ahead on either path, and contemplates which one to travel.
The poem is a metaphor for life’s choices, and the impact they can have on how our lives shape up.
Frost continued toward the end of the poem, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by…”
The “road less traveled”, in this instance, is a metaphor for nonconformity. It leads the speaker down their own path, one they state “has made all the difference.”
It wasn’t until a recent rereading of this poem that I realized Frost’s words have a lot to do with some of the existentialist ideas I’ve written about recently.
For example, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote about this idea as it relates uniquely to human beings. Particularly, he remarked that humans are unique in our ability to reflect on our existence—and on our ability to make choices in life.
It’s an ability that separates us from all other animals, as we know it. In this way, it’s an advantage we are born with.
Ironically, this creates a downside, as well; because we are free to make our own choices and reflect on their consequences, we often realize when we make “bad” or “wrong” choices.
What’s worse, we might even consciously make choices against the values of our better nature simply because we think it’s what other people would want of us.
This is the nonconformity Frost wrote of in 1915. Like all good messages, the buck didn’t stop with Frost way back then.
The Irish poet David Whyte expounded on the concept of forks in the road and nonconformity in his own words when he said, “How do you know that you’re on your path? Because it disappears.”
This is a nice iteration of Frost’s own words on this topic. The whole of Whyte’s speech after this line is very good—you can click here to watch it.
Whyte’s quote, again, directly communicates with Jaspers’s ideas on choices.
For Jaspers, through choices, people can live an authentic life or an inauthentic life. The “inauthentic life” is characterized by conformity—which Jaspers characterizes as a lack of reflection on our own existence.
The “authentic life”, on the other hand, is one that reflects our values, and our ability to make choices about how to live our own lives.
So, when we come to a fork in the road, what should we do?
As the trite platitude suggests, we should simply “take it”. We should take whichever path is true to ourselves—worn or not.
No matter which path we take, which road we choose, it should reflect us authentically, and the life that we want to live. Not the one we think is expected of us, or the one we think others would want us to take.
Our path should be the one we are compelled to.
Authenticity—to ourselves as we understand ourselves inside—is the key. It’s the key that can lead us down the road less traveled, down the path that disappears, and to a life we are happy we lived.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I’ve said it before, but poetry really is a treasure trove for great existentialist insight. It’s a medium that lends itself to the most honest expressions of human thought. Worth trying on.
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