An arrogant amorality - The Forest or the Trees.

Arrogant Amorality. A concept as chilling as it is compelling. An exploration of its symbolic anatomy within a mythic narrative.

I invite you into an endless forest of choices, where roads outnumber trees, and each path conjures a different fate. It’s a cosmic tangle of possibility, a tribute to Frost and a challenge to finality. To the turning of a poem into a mythic riddle.

A question unfurls like a ribbon through eternity. Let’s walk it together - through a story that begins where Frost’s poem ends, in a forest not of two paths, but of infinite divergence.

An embodiment of arrogant amorality standing at the fork of fate, scorning consequence and choosing the path not for its mystery, but for its power.

"Mr. Robert Frost, I thoroughly adore you poem...The Road Not Taken...sir. But what if there are more than two roads diverging into the woods, what if there are more roads than trees...roads with different variations...what if the choices never end...What if they are more than the number of atoms in the observable universe. What then"? I pause, waiting.

"You wrote this poem, sending your dear acquaintance an advanced copy - the writer Edward Thomas". Still I hear no answer.

~~~~~~~~Thoughts made in the Aside of the play of life

For Thomas and Frost had become close friends and took many walks together. One day, as they were walking together, they came across two roads. Thomas was indecisive about which road to take, and in retrospect often lamented that they should have taken the other one. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in 1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken". Thomas took the poem seriously and personally, and it may have been significant in his decision to enlist in World War I. He was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.

"Ah, my dear Mr. Frost, how sad you must have been, maybe even blaming yourself just a little for his decision". I continue.

~~~~~~~~From the outer sphere of existence - Mr. Frost sighs, as he replies...

"Ah my child...possibility is the basis of everything...hope, dream, regret love...and all moments worth living. Just like books and the temptation to open them...so are the chapters of our lives a temptation worth the risk for the opening of new doors to opportunities. For excellent may be the outcome...the result of wise choices of the many alternatives...hoping all the while to not encounter the paradoxical other sides of the coin".

He speaks in riddles, conundrums and metaphors...as many a great poet before and after him usually does.

"Is there a shortcut to wisdom...Equidistant to oneself, mid struggle, mid drowning, flailing in the ocean of living"? I ask.

"If only we had existing an entity, a mechanism to simplify the intricate complexity of the quantum universe of mad, sad, unwise, sane and infinitely human...human things".

Aside I wonder if he had already met AI.

He continues...

"A pawn in the game of chess in not just a pawn...rather it is a queen in waiting, it just waits to find a way to keep moving forward...one square at a time. Once it gets to the other side, it unlocks all types of power. Then the thing that looks the most ordinary...may become extraordinary".

He was making more sense than I had earlier or previously imagined...

"Is it impossible to live without being hurt...without hurting others". I interject.

Frost hisses...clearly annoyed.

"You will never truly live if you keep seeking the meaning of life...equally annoying ...seeking with an air of arrogant amorality...no one really understands anyone...pain, regret and all the emotions will always be factored into living...forget the ifs, ands, buts and maybes...Just live".

I felt ashamed. Still, I had more questions.

"What if everything that has ever happened to a person has happened in another lived life...maybe explained by quantum physics".

Frost smiles...he is intrigued.

"Being not absolute in sureness about what interests you...but sure about what does not...existential philosophy...being there with yourself when something wonderful happens to you....is like a smile that curves at the end - like a fallen leaf".

Um...ok...that is deep.

"If there is a book of regrets or a book of achievements and success...does it get lighter or heavier as life goes on...kind of like Schrodinger's cat and the eternal conundrum...are there white spaces...noises filling or emptying the spaces"? I kind of muse.

He coughs...looks up at the sky.

"Why do we erect barriers to ourselves...masking truths and lies...if we choose wisely, could we live forever...would we want to live eternally in the deafening crush of humanity, wandering, asking who we are are and whether or not we should dream big".

He kind of lost me here.

"Human beings when in a collective, say, like a rock concert, they roar like uncaged lions...becoming another type of animal - completely threatening at first; kind of like Hercules facing the many-headed hydra....then they come to realize the roar is support, not danger...becoming strength and power as one mighty voice".

Ah!

He continues...

"Pop stars, celebrities, platform favorites who say a single word and get all the applause, the votes, the attention ... total fame acquired with minimal effort...Yet their stardom is precarious...for may come the fall...ashes they could become when the fire goes out...for fire has no motive...it just burns".

Every sentence now becomes like an animal running into a road...unaware of the danger...I know not what Frost knows of pop stars and modern lives of celebrities...but we run with it.

Kind of like being slapped and kissed at the same time...in patterns and the rhythms to life.

No rejection only redirection.

The Forest of Infinite Roads

They say the traveler came to a fork in the woods. But that was long ago, when the world still believed in simplicity. Now the forest has grown strange.

The trees are fewer than the roads. The canopy is thin, barely able to shade the endless lattice of paths that crisscross the earth like veins in a dreaming god. Each road is different - some paved in obsidian, others spiraling upward into the sky, others tunneling into the roots of memory. There are roads that hum, roads that taste like regret, roads that vanish when looked at directly.

The traveler - let’s call him Frost, though he is not the poet, only the echo - stands at the center. He has walked for centuries, or perhaps only moments. Time here is not linear. It folds like origami, and the creases are choices.

He once believed in the myth of two paths. That one choice could define a life. That regret was a companion, not a labyrinth. But now he sees: the forest is not a test, it is a mirror. Every road he did not take still exists, winding on without him, populated by versions of himself who made different decisions. Some are kind. Some cruel. Some never learned to speak. Some rule empires. Some never left the womb.

He kneels and touches the soil. It pulses. Beneath it, the roads continue - subterranean arteries of possibility. Above, the sky is webbed with bridges, each one a decision made by someone else, intersecting his own. The air smells of ink and entropy.

A voice speaks...not from the trees, but from the space between them.

"What if the roads outnumber the atoms in the universe"?

Frost does not answer. He is busy watching a road unravel before him, made of mirrors. In each reflection, he sees a different self. One smiles. One weeps. One is a child holding a lantern.

He walks forward. Not to choose, but to witness.

Because in this forest, the road not taken is not a regret.

It is a chorus.

It is a church steeple.

It is a question that never ends.