It would be hard to imagine a better description of the individualism of Frost himself, whose own background would have made him strongly sympathetic to the women in question. It’s not a joke or trick that his poem would now serve as a governing metaphor for their ambitions. Frost was aware of the ambiguities of choice and self-reliance, certainly, but that didn’t make him any less sure that we are the primary engineers of our separate fates.

It is a way of looking at the world that is hard to avoid in the United States. It frames the American self-help industry, with its relentless focus on a self that improves or grows because an individual has elected to do something (“It’s the choice to show up and be real,” says Brené Brown), rather than because a community has come together to help one of its troubled members. It is unavoidable in the advertising industry, which is a 180-billion-dollar business in the United States—more than a third of the global total. “Be yourself,” advises Audi America in marketing the Q5 crossover SUV while dozens of nearly identical beige cars made by Audi’s competitors roll by and a background song advises us to “find one that don’t look the same.” German advertising for the same car involves a series of thousands of placards being flipped precisely by a crowd of hundreds, and Japanese ads make a whimsical visual joke with a bicycle. If you’re selling something in the United States, so the thinking goes, you had better play to customers’ desire to differentiate themselves. The historical pedigree of that desire extends to the country’s founding. “Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice,” said Thomas Jefferson, “a man is not a man, but a member, an instrument, a thing.” A member, an instrument, a thing. It is against this backdrop that the independent American self is built and claimed, for better and worse. It is against this backdrop that the crossroads emerges, with the solitary chooser at its center.

EPILOGUE

The Crossroads

The Road Not Taken” is a portrait of the choosing self. But it’s also a critique of that self—and in this sense, the path the speaker eventually takes is less important than the structure of the crossroads on which he stands. On one branch of the diverging road, we have the celebratory individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” On the other branch, we have the skepticism of Tocqueville, who worries that Americans believe they

owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.