Extract

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Two paths diverge in a yellow wood, and a traveller pauses to choose between them, knowing he will likely never return to walk the other. Robert Frost's 1916 poem has become the most misread work in American literature, quoted at graduations as a hymn to rugged individualism when it is, in fact, a sly meditation on the stories we tell ourselves about our choices. Frost wrote it to tease his friend Edward Thomas, who agonized over which path to take on their walks together. The roads are virtually identical. The difference is invented afterward, in the telling. That closing sigh is not triumph but the birth of a necessary fiction, the human need to believe that what happened was what we chose.