Why Do You Talk So Much, Robert Frost?

“I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear

Forever the noise of these

More than another noise

Thousand Hills State Park, Kirksville, MO

So close to our dwelling place?...

They are that that talks of going

But never gets away;

And that talks no less for knowing,

As it grows wiser and older,

That now it means to stay…

I shall set forth for somewhere,

I shall make the reckless choice

Some day when they are in voice

And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.”

—Robert Frost, “The Sound of the Trees”

The above poem is the bookend to the collection originally published as Mountain Interval, now known by its more marketable, recognizable title The Road Not Taken. In it, Robert Frost ruminates on beginnings and endings (“there are no such things./ There are only middles”) the challenge to have both a past and a future, the mixed results of technological advances (telephone poles, forsooth!) and the mysteries of nature, of things that both grow and stay the same.

Another crop of young people are becoming freshmen at college now. As with last year’s crop, which I belonged to, there is not so much a wide spread to how these people respond to this event so much as enormous disparity between them. To those who speak of extreme excitement, of straining at the limits of patience, of the certain excellence of the coming months: I raise my glass in respect and appreciation, but I really don’t understand how you feel this way. Not that I see anything wrong about that reaction. But to those who react with more uncertain sentiments, with enormously long Facebook statuses lavish with thanks for what they have been given with perhaps a dubious word or two at the end about the promise of the future: to you, a heartfelt and hearty “cheers.”

I sympathize who can see with some clarity what they are leaving behind and who cannot see at all what they are going to are faced with feelings they may have never felt before. With their minds they understand what is necessary and good about going away to school; with their hearts they ask what the sense is in leaving something good for something else, and grapple with the stunning amount of unknowing that confronts them. If their feelings are anything like mine were, of course, this is only a single thread in the Gordian’s knot of things they think, feel, and wish right now. They are making the sounds of Frost’s trees, of Frost himself, the songs of staying and going that rise and fall and never resolve.

I merely hope that they do not split this knot artificially, like me and others—that they do not respond to a question by cutting it apart, but give themselves enough time to unwind each strand. In that time of uncertainty last year, I demanded a quiet hope to act as an immovable fact.

But seeing things like those long thankful Facebook statuses is undeniably a good sign. They know that they ultimately don’t know how to respond to the enormous questions that now beat at their doors. But this causes them to speak and to write, and for that I am thankful.

One thing I’ve found is that there is no truly helpful advice for college, and a lot that's just annoying ("Plastics!"); the only accurate thing you can say is that there are no answers to those questions, and won’t be for a while. But unknowing need not be fatal, nor any of the answers that may yet grow in its fertile soil. And this growing takes more time than we are normally willing to allow.

But those are only the words of another tree talking of staying and going. And words are always offered in abundance to people about to leave for college, from aunts and uncles, teachers, friends—so I do not pretend to be adding much of anything. We are always motivated to say things to what they perceive to be younger versions of ourselves, the things we think we needed to hear then, even if we are speaking the answers to questions that belong to us and not to them.

No matter who hears, though, we must keep talking. It's more for ourselves than for anyone else, but occasionally you hear something that, while not really an answer, clarifies the challenge you face. There have been a couple old, gnarled trees, like Frost, that have been helpful to me in this way. Another is the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote to someone in which he recognized his younger self:

“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

—from Letters to a Young Poet

Anton Chekhov also deeply valued unanswered questions, above all answers we may try to throw at them:

“You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.”

—from a letter to Alexei Suvorin

For people who deal with change like I do, no one can really tell you anything that will be what you are looking for. But you can, at least, keep talking, and listening to yourself talk, which is called writing.

“Why do you talk so much,

Robert Frost? One day

I drove up to Ripton to ask,

I stayed the whole day

And never got the chance

to put the question.”

—Galway Kinnell, “For Robert Frost”