The difficulty is that if the self is something we make (like a business), it’s hard to see how it can also be something we find (like a chest of doubloons). The metaphors are in considerable tension, if not contradictory. Do we take the less traveled road because doing so will reveal the glitter of the True Self? Or do we take that road because doing so somehow creates the True Self? What is interesting is that people seem generally happy to ignore this tension, shifting frictionlessly from one model of selfhood to the other, sometimes within the same sentence. If Wayne Dyer tells us that we are the sum of our choices, he is also perfectly willing to say that “letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self.” So we are the sum of our choices, but there is also some “true self” that remains hidden. By the same token, while one hates to pick on Eleanor Roosevelt, I should point out that when I quoted her earlier saying “we learn who we really are,” I could have added that she immediately followed that remark with “and then live with that decision.” So we find our essence by . . . deciding what it is? She also asserts that “we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die.” Can I “really” be something that I am also choosing? And if so, who (or what) is this “I” person?

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NOT ROBERT FROST, least of all in “The Road Not Taken.” “I have written,” said Frost in a letter to Sidney Cox, “to keep the curious out of the secret places of my mind both in my verse and in my letters to such as you. A subject has to be held outside of me with struts and as it were set up for an object.” And in a letter to Robert Newdick: “The point I was trying to make is that I was a very hard person to make out if I was any judge of human nature. I might easily be most deceiving when most bent on telling the truth.” Frost is talking in both letters about the misconceptions of biographers (and readers), but he plainly savors the idea of being a mystery to himself as well. “I was a very hard person to make out if I was any judge of human nature”: Who is the “I” here? Wouldn’t Frost know whether or not he was “any judge of human nature”? And why is the sentence in the past tense? Likewise, why say you “might” be most deceiving when trying hardest to be truthful? Can’t you just be truthful? As with his attitude toward his own choices (or lack thereof), Frost’s view of his own inner life was a combination of indomitable certainty and serene ignorance. His public showmanship mirrored a private theater in which the ultimate question was not the authenticity of the performer but the canniness of the drama and the allure of the masks.