Beginnings & the open road

On Frost

Self-justification and the path you’ve chosen

All week, I’ve been having conversations with my friends about the common misreading of this poem, how both roads were “really about the same,” and how the poem is poking fun at the self-narrativization of our past to justify the path you’ve chosen that brought you to the present.

An old friend of mine has a kid. I do not. My friend looks back on his decision as the kid is about to celebrate their first birthday and says that even though the first year was, in his words, a crucible, it changed him for the better. With all sincerity and a distinct lack of pretension, he’s described it as unlocking the understanding of another deeper aspect of the human condition. Knowledge gained that can only be understood by living it.  And my coworker in his forties, who doesn’t have kids, exclaims that ” ‘could never have a kid, we’ve already decided no kids, it’s too late for her at least, and we wouldn’t trade it for the world. Kids are bad karma. Ripped them into life, forcing them to work for some bastard’s company just to eat.”

Where I sit in this pattern: when I was younger, the idea was to move and live abroad. I will someday, but first to save up money, get out of student loans, then save up equity in the house, further my career, get a big enough 401k, and get out of the rat race. An attempt to cushion myself incase something goes wrong. An attempt to not just live my same life in a different zip code. The threshold keeps moving. We’re always one mile away. Until then, though, Philadelphia. Until the infinite scroll checklist is done.

On Thoreau

Walking, knowledge, and fences

The whole idea of walking West into nature, that resilient through line where societies are corrupt and corrupted, where the closer we get to society, the more corrupt we are, and the closer we are to nature, the closer we are to “real” knowledge.

I really liked his whole thing on different types of knowledge. The one that stuck with me was, “Which is the best man to deal with? — he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?” “It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.”

I also really liked the diatribe on fences and breaking down fences. Reminds me of the famous line from Rousseau about the first man who put up a fence, committing the greatest crime against humanity.

Reading Thoreau now, with America’s current state, you can see the rot of American individualism in society. In one sense maybe Thoreau was right that we’re not close enough to nature, but in another sense America is basically all fences at this point. He had too much faith in the American project, but he was a true believer in it.

On Carver

How form relates to function

Carver’s story I really liked too.

Very interesting premise with the blind man. The writing itself is kind of amazing. It’s very curt, very short, but it has a really nice rhythm to it, the most like a drumbeat, just quietly moving along. It’s interesting to think about how the minimalism of the text relates to the actual thought patterns of the husband. And his eventual epiphany, where all he says is something like, “it was really something.” It was almost orgiastic the way the text keeps building and building up to that epiphany moment. So how does the form relate to the function? That’s the thought on my mind.

I get the sense that even at the end, the husband can’t fully understand what he’s experiencing. It’s almost like having an orgasm for the first time. You don’t really have words to put to it.

The husband also mirrors the blind man by closing his eyes, trying to feel and share a connection with another human. So at those kinds of points, does language even matter? That’s an open question. Does the better you can describe something mean you get more out of it, or less?

Taking the quote from Thoreau’s piece about negative knowledge, having more language to describe a thing might actually take away from the experience, because you think you know everything, and you become blind to the moment. No longer experiencing it through your senses but through the self, touched by ego, narrativizing what is going on around you. Whereas you could just be in nature, embracing the change, knowing that what is in nature today is not what is going to be in nature tomorrow. There’s a perspective shift.

On the cathedral as symbol

American individualism, side by side

Frost made me read Thoreau differently. Frost’s narrator would be critiquing Thoreau, who believes in the project. Thoreau is mythologizing the American character, becoming one with nature, almost like a John Muir figure. Thoreau’s earnestness becomes suspect once you see Frost pointing out the ironic version of the same impulse and applying a little bit of historical analysis to the moment.

Both walkers are walking roads, going places. But Thoreau’s walker is trying to leave the city behind, disregarding any thought of anywhere but where you are. Frost’s walker is in the woods too, very perceptive of the two roads, but before he’s even taken the path, he’s already self-narrativizing it to the point where he’s not in the same mindset as Thoreau’s walker. In Frost’s poem, choosing one road over the other was basically a matter of impulse. Then the temporal shift at the end turns that impulse into destiny. Frost is making fun of an impulsive choice that gets dressed up as meaning. The American expansion into the West was filled with the same self-narrativizing mythologizing. The explorer might’ve been who Thoreau was really talking about, the Lewis and Clark. But they gave way to the settlement of the West. The cowboy, who in reality was typically Mexican, was battling nature, both the mountains and the “indians,” and then spinning a story of its atrocities as part of its manifest destiny.

Three relationships to language

The cleaner through line is about language itself. Frost mistrusts language or uses it ironically. With language, we can trick ourselves into believing that all decisions create differences, or that they were necessary decissions, or the only decision. We even use language to give moral weight to our justifications. We can be one linguistic traveler traveling two roads at once, experiencing two meanings. Thoreau, on the other hand, loves language. He pulls from classical literature a lot, uses writers of antiquity to give weight to his arguments and his individualism, and there’s a great-man idea running underneath where these great men wrote and so on. Ironically, he might even undercut his own getting-closer-to-nature argument by being too verbose and romanticizing it too much.

Carver shows another way of using language: not having the language is what actually gets the husband closer to the epiphany. So Frost mistrusts language and shows you how it can trick you. Thoreau loves language and goes a little too hard with it. Carver shows that not having language can be the way through.

The Frost narrator and the deferred-life version of me are doing the same thing. Living in the story you’ll tell later instead of the moment you’re in. Thoreau and Carver are both saying, in different ways, that you have to actually be here. And there’s a tension I want to hold rather than resolve: this whole project is about getting the language back, reclaiming the writer-self who could say more than “I liked it.” But the texts themselves are warning that articulation can become its own kind of blindness. Tonight gave me three different answers to that question, and they don’t agree.