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Pondering the
Possibilites of "The Road Not Taken"
(The Daily Corinthian, 21 May 2005) |
I
have rubbed out entire lives.
In fact, we all have. We all do.
We take lives everyday, and we let live. The choices we make
determine who we are. Some choices necessarily preclude certain
lives we could have lived, while other choices allow for those
we do lead.
One of my favorite poets, Robert
Frost, writes about this notion in his famous but oft-misread
poem "The Road Not Taken." I thought again of this
poem as the time for high school graduation approaches. It's
not unseemly to consider Frost's verse amidst the litany of traditional
valedictory speeches. Often the decision of Frost's traveler
to take one of the "two roads [that] diverged in a yellow
wood" is touted as a manifesto of individuality or nonconformity.
But I'm not so sure that's exactly what Frost conveys in the
poem.
Frost tells us his traveler is
"sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler."
And even though it appears at first that Frost is taking the
"road less traveled," as the cliché has come
to be known, both roads are really similarly worn, his speaker
reveals.
After he chooses his particular
road, he tells us that, "Oh, I kept the first for another
day!" as he doubts he will ever return to the original road.
Last of all, he sighs, imagining the story-romanticized and mythologized,
no doubt-he will one day tell about taking the less traveled
road "that has made all the difference" in his life.
Regret abounds in Frost's ironic
poem-not regret as guilt but in the sense of loss and longing.
Each fork in the road that Frost's traveler encounters provides
an obstacle in returning to a previous road.
Frost's divergent roads provide
a poignant metaphor for our lives. This very week I felt this
same sense of regret, of loss and longing, when I returned to
the house in East Tennessee my husband and I will soon be selling
after our move to Memphis.
I cleaned out the last remnants
of my closet there. And there were things I hadn't touched in
years. Going back to that place, handling those objects as I
stuffed them into plastic bags, evoked memories connected to
them.
Lying dormant in that closet were
two baseball caps Mike and I had obtained on a trip in New Orleans
and wore there during a torrential downpour. Old bathing suits
elicited summer vacations in Florida. I located my graduation
cap I wore when I received my master's degree at The University
of Tennessee in 1998. And there was a dusty bottle of Irish whiskey
I had purchased merely as a souvenir for an old college friend
in Dublin when I had studied during the summer in London in 1995.
(I was therefore reminded that not only am I a sentimentalist
and a hoarder, I am a procrastinator, too, never having made
the effort to pass along the souvenir to him.)
Driving the almost 400 miles back
to Memphis, I thought about my life just before I came to that
house, as well as the life I had lived there. Those objects still
held the smell of that house even as I remembered it the first
time I visited Mike.
That fragrance made me long for
those days, although I know much of it translated to pure nostalgia.
The mind has a way of doing that, of romanticizing the past,
as Frost so deftly, subtly points out in his poem.
But I also felt a sense of longing
for a life that might have been. I wondered what would have happened
had I stayed in East Tennessee and continued teaching there.
I wondered what my life would have been like had I lived on in
that house. Suddenly, I wanted to live both lives: the one I
am living now but also the one I had left behind.
Despite my satisfaction at the
place where I am in my life now-my love for my husband, my return
to the role of graduate student as well as college instructor,
and the great ecstasy I discover when I am alone, writing-I marveled
at my desire to consider the possibilities.
I entertained the idea that contentment
does not mutually exclude desire. Desire , after all, makes us
human, propels us. Accordingly, Aristotle, the great philosopher,
said, "Man is his desire."
It is safe and healthy still to
wonder. I wonder about others with whom I might have spent my
life, or about what might have happened had I chosen to become
a lawyer or journalist instead of a college instructor and creative
writer. I wonder how my life would be right now had I chosen
to jet off to New York or London to live, instead of Memphis.
I wonder what my life would have been had I chosen to remain
in my native McNairy County.
As part of this wonder, this desire,
I still hold close immense lists of things I want to accomplish.
I long to learn how to play a musical instrument, something I
regret I didn't start, say, in fifth grade. Specifically, I want
to play R&B and blues on the saxophone and bass guitar. And
I don't see an airplane pass overhead without the great desire
to learn how to fly. In my alternate realm, I am not a college
instructor but, rather, a FedEx cargo pilot.
The unfortunate aspect of desire,
though, is that we have one short lifetime apportioned to each
of us. And all too often we gloss over the clichés of
life-life's too short, for example-to really get out and break
in our souls in living.
On the other hand, I have accomplished
some of my desires. For one, I always wanted to act in a stage
play. I realized that desire in January when I made my debut
in Corinth Theatre Arts' production of "Bus Stop."
Granted, I had no idea when I landed the role that I would have
to don a risqué outfit and fishnet stockings, a la Marilyn
Monroe, and stand atop a table to sing "That Old Black Magic,"
but during my last tabletop performance, I realized I was enjoying
myself. I was sad to think I might not have the same opportunity
again to inhabit that character with whom I had fallen in love.
In order, therefore, to accomplish
our desires, we have to take risks. If you love someone, tell
them. If you long to parachute out of an airplane, take that
first breathtaking step. If you want to wake up and run through
the sprinklers in your pajamas, do it.
It was also Robert Frost, this
same poet, who wrote in another beautiful, masterful poem titled
"Birches," that "Earth's the right place for love:
/ I don't know where it's likely to go better." And he's
right. Love and desire and the essence of what it means to be
alive reach their peak when tested against the realities of life.
(Stacy Jones, a Southerner,
is a Master of Fine Arts student in fiction writing at The University
of Memphis. She is a native of Guys, Tenn., and her columns,
which appear on Saturdays, are archived at Southern-Drawl.com.) |
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