(Inspired by Sarah Hendren’s recent, wonderfully loaded post, “On Choosing”)

An excerpt from Mark Schwen and Dorthy Bass’s book Leading Lives That Matter — specifically, the introduction to the section titled “How Shall I Tell the Story of My Life”:

We’ve read about the reasons for choosing one kind of life over another one, about whom we should heed when we are making decisions, and about how and why so many of the things that shape our identities are at one and the same time free and constrained. Leading a life that matters surely involves making good choices.

Though these deep and legitimate concerns about the place of free choice in our lives may explain why “The Road Not Taken” has been “taken” to be about choice, the poem is not mainly about choice at all. It instead explores the shape of the stories we tell to ourselves and others about ourselves over the course of our lives. The poem is also about how and why these stories change. The poem teaches us that there are two things of roughly equal importance in determining the quality of the lives we lead: the choices we make and what we make of those choices. Our interpretations of what we have chosen to do and of what has happened to us often take the form of stories, and these narratives in turn constitute our inner sense of ourselves, which includes feelings of meaning, purpose, and significance. To put this a bit differently, our imagination is just as important as our reason in shaping our identities and in making for lives of significance and substance. The widespread misreading of “The Road Not Taken” may indicate that as a people we do not rightly appreciate the importance of the imagination in shaping our efforts to lead lives that matter.

When we come to Frost’s poem with these latter ideas in our minds, we notice right away that the whole poem consists of two very different stories of the “same” event. The first story is relatively long (the first fifteen lines), quite indecisive about whether the two roads encountered by the speaker on an autumn morning differed from one another at all, and concluded by a resolution to keep one of the roads for some other time. The second story is much shorter (the final three lines), much more resolute about the differences between the two roads, and concluded by a resolution to take that one “less traveled.” The speaker tells the first story sometime soon after the event and then imagines how he will tell the story differently “ages and ages hence.” The speaker knows that his perspective on life will change over time and that he will be a different kind of person in old age than he was when he first came upon the two roads. He (or she) even knows how he will be different: he’ll be surer in his judgments and more dramatic in narrating certain particular choices in his life. Memory, the thread of continuity in his identity, will serve to some extent his sense of himself even as the changing shape of his life’s story will serve to change his sense of the significance of his past. One choice will have made “all the difference,” and his literally “self” serving memory will move him to claim that he once chose a “less traveled” way, even though he was not at all clear about this matter in the immediate aftermath of the moment of choice.

Like the speaker in this poem, all of us revise our own life stories all of the time. Unlike the speaker in the poem, many of us are not as aware of this as we should be. Sometimes we revise our stories depending on our audience. Would not most of us tell the story of an embarrassing experience somewhat differently to our parents, our siblings, our lovers, and our emplyers? But we undertake our work of revision more often for the sake of our primary audience, ourselves. The readings that follow “The Road Not Taken” will help us to understand the complexities and the vital importance of this constant process of “composing our lives.”

And this is their brief, thought-provoking intro to Frost’s poem itself:

The life and work of Robert Frost (1874-1963) spanned the entire first half of the twentieth century. As we noted in the introduction to another one of his poems, “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (Chapter 2), the deceptive simplicity of much of his work has tempted many readers to offer interpretations that are superficial at best or altogether mistaken at worst. To avoid such interpretations here, it is best to begin thinking about this poem by comparing the two accounts of the “same” event that exist within the poem. We have indicated some of the differences between the two stories in the general introduction to this chapter above.

For our purposes in this chapter, we want to use the poem to help us understand the process by which we ourselves revise our own life stories. So we need to ask ourselves what kind of person the speaker is, based upon the kind of story that he tells and the way in which he tells it in lines 1-15. For example, he seems constantly to second-guess himself and his judgments. How else would you characterize him?

When the speaker imagines what he will be telling about the same event many years later, he offers an account interrupted by a sigh (that dash at the end of line 18). Is this a sigh of regret or resignation or fatigue? The feat that the speaker accomplishes is quite remarkable. To see how and why this is so, think of the story you would now tell about why you made a certain decision — for example, about why you chose to attend one college rather than another one. Now try to imagine how that story will be different when you tell it again “ages and ages hence.” Now compare the two. What does that comparison teach you about how you expect to develop over time?

And why not include the poem as well:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Nick Catoggio:

To a human being prone to normal emotions like shame and remorse, his sheer brazenness is powerful evidence that he sincerely believes he’s done nothing wrong—which in turn is evidence that he really might not have done anything wrong. That’s the essence of his messaging strategy around January 6, one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in U.S. history. Through herculean amounts of shamelessness and gaslighting, never apologizing or betraying any sense of regret, the president and his toadies in right-wing media successfully persuaded millions of swing voters that America’s first-ever coup attempt was either no big deal or some sort of frame-up.

[…]

I don’t blame Democrats for not leaning into moral outrage this week, though. Why bother? It doesn’t work. Americans don’t share it, or don’t share it enough. The campaign was a referendum on whether the shame of having a president with a coup plot, two impeachments, and four indictments to his record would bother swing voters enough to prefer a lackluster normie Democrat instead. We got our answer.

[…]

I’m convinced that Americans will end up holding Trump to a lower standard morally, ethically, and civically in his second term than they have other presidents, and not just because his infectious shamelessness has numbed them to his outrages.

It’s because, unlike in his first term, they knew what they were signing up for. You cannot watch January 6 happen, vote for him four years later, and then huff indignantly when he starts his own crypto Ponzi scheme or cuts off security for a critic who’s under credible threat of being murdered by terrorists. Even if you feel a pang of vestigial embarrassment or disgust about it, you can’t complain without looking like a preposterous rube. Trump is being Trump. What on earth did you expect?

[…]

So, certainly, the cowardice they showed this week by not emphatically denouncing the pardons is reprehensible. But on the other hand: What on earth did you expect?

Our problem is not Republicans in Congress or even the Republican in the White House. Our problem, as ever, is the millions of boiled frogs who’ve concluded that shamelessness is a political virtue, not a vice. Blame them for what’s happened, and for what’s to come.

Walter Olsen:

There’s no way around it. The thugs who broke cops’ bones, the creeps who used bear spray against the Republic’s defenders, the ones who express no remorse and say they’d do it all again, the ones judges warned about as at risk for reoffending if freed—they’re all walking free. And they’re walking free for one reason only: because they did it for Trump.

It’s a sad day for America. It deserves lasting infamy. […]

In the days after the order, several federal trial court judges in Washington, D.C. used the orders they wrote dismissing cases, as entailed in Trump’s order, to speak to the history books about what had just happened. As part of such an order dismissing pending charges against one defendant, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly included this passage for the ages about how historical truth can be affirmed even if legal process is stopped in its tracks:

Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens. Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.

What role law enforcement played that day and the heroism of each officer who responded also cannot be altered or ignored. Present that day were police officers from the U.S. Capitol Police and those who came to their aid when called: the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, Montgomery County Police Department, Prince George’s County Police Department, Arlington County Police Department, and Fairfax County Police Department. Grossly outnumbered, those law enforcement officers acted valiantly to protect the Members of Congress, their staff, the Vice President and his family, the integrity of the Capitol grounds, and the Capitol Building—our symbol of liberty and a symbol of democratic rule around the world. For hours, those officers were aggressively confronted and violently assaulted. More than 140 officers were injured. Others tragically passed away as a result of the events of that day. But law enforcement did not falter. Standing with bear spray streaming down their faces, those officers carried out their duty to protect. All of what I have described has been recorded for posterity, ensuring that what transpired on January 6, 2021 can be judged accurately in the future.

Molly White:

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also joined in concerns about politicians launching tokens, posting: “The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send them any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively.” […]

I think it’s not great that a Senator who personally holds bitcoin can move bitcoin markets by a couple thousand dollars with just a tweet – and it’s not great that someone with a financial stake in crypto is tasked with regulating the sector. – The Subcommittee is stacked with crypto proponents, with pro-crypto Ruben Gallego (D-AZ, recipient of $10 million in crypto PAC funding) serving as the ranking member. Pro-crypto Republicans Bernie Moreno (OH, recipient of $40 million), Dave McCormick (PA, recipient of $35,000), Thom Tillis (NC), and Bill Hagerty (TN) are also taking seats. […]

Meanwhile, various financial firms are eagerly testing the waters with the new, more permissive regulators by filing applications for exchange-traded funds tracking memecoins including DOGE, BONK, and TRUMP. 21 I suppose they made their bed, and now they’re going to lie in it by being forced to review endless applications for the dumbest ETFs possible. If a financial adviser ever recommends I diversify my portfolio by buying shares of a PEPE ETF, I shall take that as my cue to withdraw every penny and place it under my mattress. […]

At least eight people have been arrested in connection to the kidnapping of the co-founder of Ledger, a popular cryptocurrency hardware wallet. David Balland and his wife were kidnapped from their home in France early on January 21 by a group who demanded a large cryptocurrency ransom. The group cut off one of Balland’s fingers, sending it to his associates and demanding ransom from them and family members. However, police were able to locate Balland and his wife on the night of January 22. “That’s 7 crypto wrench attacks in the first 3 weeks of this year. Unprecedented acceleration,” wrote Jameson Lopp, using slang to refer to physical attacks on people known to hold large sums of crypto. Lopp maintains an ongoing list of people who have been attacked in attempted or successful cryptocurrency thefts. […]

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also joined in concerns about politicians launching tokens, posting: “The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send them any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively.”

Nicholas Carr:

Near the end of “Minerva’s Owl,” in a rare moment of concision, [Harold Adams Innis] summed up his view: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” With that one startling and seemingly paradoxical sentence, he called into question a foundational assumption of modern media and, indeed, modern society: that an abundance of information brings a wealth of knowledge. Information and knowledge, he saw, could be adversaries. […]

The early, idealistic view of the Internet proved an illusion. The system went out of balance almost immediately, its spatial reach subverting its temporal depth. Far from alleviating our present-mindedness, the net magnified it.

Innis would not have been surprised. Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data. When the flow of information reaches the consumer, it’s translated into another flow: a stream of images formed of illuminated pixels, shifting patterns of light. The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new — to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.

(Also, this line from Carr is too good to pass up: “To use Google today is to enter not an archive but a bazaar.”)

Of course, a failure to communicate is nothing foreign to human interaction. If the dominant media belligerently amplify the failure, they certainly didn’t create it. But if the medium is both the message and the metaphor (and it certainly is), it’s a steeper, uphill battle than it ought to be for us these days.

For all his insight and brilliance, Innis was a largely pessimistic man, Carr tells us. But he ends the piece with what is basically a shout-out to the one glimmer of hope he finds in Innis: a reverence for the spoken word. “A spoken word may be as evanescent as a tweet or a snap,” Carr says, “but the acts of talking and listening — together, in one place — remain unmatched as vehicles for critical, creative, and communal thought.”

Linger on that word: unmatched.

The face-to-face interaction is simply that — unmatched.

In all of human history, is there an older or simpler truth than this? Surely this is because there really is no other human kind of interaction. We replicate this, as humans, with our interactions online, and often do so wonderfully; but it is still a replication, a shadow. And — though a shadow is not nothing — information that spends any extended period of time absent the interacting body through which character and love and community emerge is bound to degrade. And it is bound to degrade everything — the character, the love, the community, and the information itself.

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

—T. S. Eliot

And yet, still unmatched is this:

To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.

—Elizabeth Bowen

Nick Catoggio:

At the center is Trump himself, a lifelong con artist and recently convicted criminal who plainly feels more kinship with foreign strongmen than with the framers of the American experiment. Around him is a motley coterie of tech oligarchs, boorish yes-men, authoritarian ideologues, and preposterous grifters, all jockeying to assert themselves. Beyond that lies a ring of servile Republican mandarins who dislike him and his politics but are too cowardly to do anything but kowtow. And beyond that extends the great mass of MAGA fanatics, ever eager to validate any impulse he might have.

Part mafia, part circus, part cult, part scam: I’ve written more than 400 columns for The Dispatch, most of them on this subject, but I’ll never do justice to how comprehensively grotesque Trump and his movement are. At noon today he smarmily swore an oath of office to defend the Constitution in the same building that his goons attacked four years ago, to his delight, in hopes of installing him in power unlawfully. If you watched it and your stomach didn’t lurch then you’re well and truly boiled.

These four years are going to be worse than even I expected. And that’s not just the usual pessimism talking.

Flipping a narrow elm board from the nearest stack, I carefully brush the dirt away from the surface with my palm.

That, from Callum Robinson’s Ingrained, is about as plain a sentence as any. But in the callous-free world of click-‘n-swipe, it’s pure gold. It says something about our time, I think, when a thing so real and so simple sounds like magic.

Want more? Of course you do:

Flipping a narrow elm board from the nearest stack, I carefully brush the dirt away from the surface with my palm. Waiting — half wincing — for the hidden splinter’s bite that mercifully does not come. The board is far too small for my father’s purposes, but it is still rather beautiful. Honeyed browns and swirling reds, slashed through with greens and purples. Colours and features that are just faintly visible beneath its dust-caked surfaces. Pressing my thumbnail into the wood’s flesh, I scrape and drag but it leaves no mark. Even elm so young as this is incredibly tough.

In a sense, I think this is the reverse of Chesterton’s “Ethics of Elfland.” 

“[Fairy] tales say that apples were golden,” Chesterton tells us, “only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” 

I have loved those lines from Chesterton since the moment I first read them. But today, it’s more than enough for a craftsman and writer like Robinson merely to say that some fresh, rough-sawn lumber is (wait for it) … honeyed-brown. And the surface of the boards is (oh my) dust-caked and damp and grainy.

He shows us the magic simply by telling us the reality.

I don’t know if one needs to have the automatic memory of running his or her fingers down the wet and granular planks of lumber at a sawmill for this to take effect. I suspect that Robinson’s descriptions are enough to make any technophile or homebody want to reach out and risk a handful of splinters — emphasis on simply reaching out.

To paraphrase (and slightly tweak) part of Chesterton’s argument: You don’t need an entire cosmos to find “largeness;” the nearest tree has always been grand enough — if you actually bother to stand next to it. Which is to say, the natural world you live in has always been plenty big enough and sacred enough for your own hungry soul.

To awaken the soul to the magnificence around it, Chesterton turns us to fairy stories, the genre par excellence for re-enchanting a disenchanted world. “Stories of magic alone,” he says, “can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.” Though I would take out the word “alone,” this is Chesterton at his finest. And I think it’s quite true that magical stories still hold this valuable and wonderful place for us.

But I wonder if a modern mind which has spent years distracted, indeed, training itself to be distracted from the physical earth its physical body evolved in, was born in, walks in, breaths in — does that mind need anything so extraordinary to wake it up?

What, after all, is gold compared to the smell and texture, and especially (you won’t believe this) the swirling reds, of just one narrow board of elm?

I sometimes suspect that many, many people will soon enough discover a pretty magic- and even dopamine-filled thrill in the plain ol’ naked world. 

Sen. Tammy Duckworth to Pete Hegseth:

How can we ask these warriors to train and perform the absolute highest standards when you are asking us to lower the standards to make you the Secretary of Defense simply because you’re buddies with our president-elect. 

Sen. Angus King’s questioning of Hegseth was also significant. Honestly, if I hear another Trump appointee evasively say (i.e., in a way devoid of any meaning whatsoever) that they “will follow the rule of law” one more goddamn time I’m gonna flip over a table. The man despises the Geneva Conventions — and, ipso facto, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Federal Criminal Statute, which also encode the laws of the Conventions — and believes that torture and slaughter are useful tools of war as long as it’s some ever-justified us who does it to some never-justified them.

No one need don rose-colored glasses when it comes to the U.S. and the Geneva Conventions to see that an ominous defining down of deviance continues.

Hua Hsu, on Spotify’s “strategies for soundtracking the entirety of our days and nights”:

As a former Spotify employee once observed, the platform’s only real competitor is silence.…

Just as we train Spotify’s algorithm with our likes and dislikes, the platform seems to be training us to be round-the-clock listeners.

I don’t think too much emphasis could be put on those words: they are training us.

As Hsu points out, this sort of “practice” is on top of the quite common criticism of Spotify’s treatment of the streamed artists themselves. But the deal is just too good — and by now, too utterly normal — to refuse, so most people don’t bother to take issue with any of this, any more than they bother to take issue with the platform’s refusal to pay any royalties to artists who aren’t popular enough while the billionaire C.E.O. (ahem) cashes out $340 million in stock.

But all of that is an old song (especially for readers of Ted Gioia). Hsu goes on to talk about Liz Pelly’s book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Pelly, says Hsu, is “aggressively moralistic,” (which, despite the phrasing, I can only read as a compliment in this context), and her book, which covers the history of streaming, from Napster to the present, is primarily about what is, for Pelly, an even greater concern than the musicians: what all this has done, and what all this is doing, to the listeners.

For us, the all-day-anytime-anywhere streamers, it’s hard to say we’re even capable of loving the music we hear, in any meaningful sense of the word “love,” since these new sounds, says Hsu, “float largely free of context or lineage.”

Instead of a connection to history, we’re offered recommendations based on what other people listened to next. I’ve never heard so much music online as I have over the past few years yet felt so disconnected from its sources.[…]

Before, it was impossible to know how many times you listened to your favorite song; what mattered was that you’d chosen to buy it and bring it into your home. What we have now is a perverse, frictionless vision for art, where a song stays on repeat not because it’s our new favorite but because it’s just pleasant enough to ignore.

I admit that when people talk about the “attention economy,” I automatically grant a certain amount of truth to that description: I have generally assumed that these companies are, in fact, vying for our attention. But this can only be true if we have no idea at all what attention actually is.

There is a famous line from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace where she says that the cure for our faults is true attention, and that true attention, being so different from a tightening pride or will, is the same thing as prayer. But what she also says in that wonderful little notebook of hers is that attention “presupposes faith and love.”

In another, more famous line in an April 1942 letter to Jöe Bousquet, Weil says, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

And in another letter to Bousquet a month later, Weil says that from the age of fourteen she had been sustained by a faith “that no true effort of attention is ever wasted, even though it may never have any visible result.”

So it begs the question: in what possible way are these companies actually getting or even wanting our attention?

I think the answer has to be that they don’t want to have anything to do with attention. What they want is less attention in the room — any room, anywhere, for anyone. What they are doing is making attention less of a possibility at all.

(Pelly does, according to Hsu, come back around to what all this does to the artist. By increasingly curtailing their music to the Spotify method and market, they essentially become Spotify employees. That is, if they’re actually getting paid for their music at all.)

I know the Spotify criticism is an often repeated story, but this was a good reminder for someone who, like Hsu, sometimes borrows the “family account” and has been especially lazy about it lately. (And, in my case, annoys the shit out of his wife by flooding the queue with Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs.)

The real question sits randomly and hardly even acknowledged in the middle of Hsu’s piece: “I wonder if any of Pelly’s arguments will inspire readers to cancel their subscriptions.”

Doutbful, of course. But more imporantly, will it (or this meager post, for that matter) inspire anyone (myself included, for that matter) to find a better way to support, attend to, and enjoy the music they love?

One can certainly hope.

So, with any luck, for 2025, it’s gonna be Bandcamp, CDs, 98.9 WCLZ, and that greatest of all Spotify competitors: silence.

Weil again, to Bousquet:

The moment stands still. The whole of space is filled, even though sounds can be heard, with a dense silence which is not an absence of sound but is a positive object of sensation; it is the secret word, the word of Love who holds us in his arms from the beginning.

And my challenge to you if you’re reading this: Think of an artist who you enjoy who you have no recent memory of directly supporting, and — today, right now — support them.

I kicked things off with Bandcamp this year by preordering Jason Isbell’s “Foxes in the Snow.”

Happy listening!