This is why the crossroads has always been where one ventures in order to blur or merge things that are defined in opposition to each other. It is the place for that which has no place. And as such, it’s never quite to be trusted. In ancient Greece, for example, crossroads were often marked with statues or shrines dedicated to the goddess Hecate. These emblems, called hekataia, typically depicted Hecate with three faces, each pointing toward one of the branching roads, and citizens would leave offerings at them to seek the goddess’s aid in passage from one place to another. But as the scholar S. I. Johnson explains, the Greeks would also bring “the polluted remains of household purification rituals” to the crossroads to be disposed of. This was because, as Johnson writes,

Both types [of worship] ultimately grew from the liminal nature of crossroads, but in opposing ways. On the one hand, crossroads were uncertain, dissociated places of passage, where protective actions were necessary. On the other hand, by the very fact of their dissociation, they were convenient vacuums into which ancient man could dispose of his religious and societal refuse—or call up that refuse, in the form of restless souls, to aid him in the performance of magic.

We want strength to face the crossroads (whether from an ancient goddess or our own inner fortitude), but we also use the crossroads to contain or summon the troubling, the uncertain, the uncanny. It lies both outside and inside the expected order of things. It belongs to no one and everyone.

As do Robert Frost and “The Road Not Taken.” Frost is the great poet of the liminal, and his natural terrain is the unsettled intersection of opposing paths. “All the fun,” he wrote to Louis Untermeyer, “is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious.” In another letter to Untermeyer, Frost begins by proclaiming himself “orthodox” and in opposition to “mad glad stuff,” but this train of thought rapidly gives way to a vision of the uncanny disturbance at the core of his own practice: