Note: The following fragment is a work of fiction—and a loose continuation of Fragment #8.
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A Satirical But Not Unserious Allegory
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood1, and I, being a young American with a modest idea of his own legend2, do not like the look of either one.
Both paths are suspiciously crowded, congested with tribes of men and women wearing the same threadbare clothes, all joking in the same unoriginal cant and marching in militaristic obedience to corporate campaigns, and I refuse to be one of them. I am a supreme individualist3 and I am not ready to surrender my unalienable right to a happy life4. No, I will blaze my own trail, I will march to the arrhythmic beat in my heart that no corporate algorithm can time, I will be true to myself, and myself alone…
And so, it’s only natural what I do.
I take a hard left turn, crash through a thicket, and venture into a land with no paths or signposts for direction, a world wholly to my own. I see a crumbling brick tower5 poking through the canopy of trees and I press on with the thrill of an adventurer exploring the new world.
The trees thicken and crowd out the light. The forest blackens. I trip over a root and hear a scream that multiplies into echoes. I backpedal in fear. I whack my head on a branch. Another scream. The dark deepens so that I cannot even see my own hand. I totter forward, though I feel I’m going in circles. Fear throttles and chokes my breath. I shiver at my memories of the sun. How dark, how cold it is in this place! I am overcome with a premonition of monsters all around me.
I walk forward with outstretched hands, unable to see, and strike what feels like a warm body.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
The person—man or woman, I do not know—speaks in a rapid staccato. Their accent and dialect are strangely similar to mine, and yet I cannot understand the meaning of their sentences.
“Do you know where are?” I try again. “Or how to get to a road from here?”
The person only babbles louder, and when I reach for their hand, they jerk away, as if they are terrified of me.
I stumble over what feels like a pile of bricks and bump into more people I cannot see, knocking heads in the dark, all of them screaming in vain bastardizations of a once common language. The throng grows thicker, a mass of faceless arms and legs and torsos, until my forehead and knees are painfully bruised. I cannot crawl in any direction without bumping into more babbling fools, and so I collapse into a depression of bricks.
It occurs to me that every inch of the forest is overrun with other humans, that I am not a great adventurer, trailblazer, or discoverer of a new world, that in fact I seem to be the last to arrive at a very ancient one. And yet we are all alone. We are orphans of the most terrible kind, cut off from our own humanity, and there is no Fraternity among the Fatherless6 for us here, no company in our misery, we are all prisoners to our own square yard7 of dark earth and bricks. It is a loneliness far lonelier than any I have felt on earth, to be suffocated in a crowd of flesh and bones that have ceased to be human—for what is a person with whom you share nothing but darkness?—and as the confusion of voices rises to a crescendo, a Gregorian-like chant without any rhythm, a Greek chorus gone mad, I too am shouting and weeping, and I wonder if I made an eternal misstep at that fork in the yellow wood.
Oh, what have I done!
Suddenly, I see a beam of light pierce the dark. Where it comes from, I do not know, but I stand up and stumble forward. It grows brighter. I break into a run and shout at the people I see cowering in their darkness, but they all have their eyes shut, babbling and chanting to themselves.
Had I too had my eyes shut? Was the light always shining or had it only just appeared? I do not know.
The light guides me through the forest until the trees begin to thin and the horizon burns like a coalbed catching flame, and I burst through a thicket onto a path with a fork that looks oddly familiar…
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I traveled down the dark one I blazed for myself.
Now I should like to walk in the sun.
Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, of course.
A nod to the doomed Neddy Merrill and his “modest idea of himself as a legendary figure”
“Supreme individualist” is language Oscar Wilde uses in De Profundis
As in the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence
See Genesis 11
Another reference to Wilde’s De Profundis. The literal expression he uses is “Confraternity of the Fatherless.”
A reference to Raskolnikov’s “square yard of space” in Crime & Punishment