The Road You Didn't Take

on Sondheim and our unlived lives

Last week, we looked at incompletion as a kind of promise. In Sunday in the Park with George, as in the still-becoming Sagrada Família, the unfinished reaches upward, outward, alive with possibility. This week, let’s approach that same idea from the other direction. What happens when the many lives we might lead narrow, through decision and circumstance, into the single life we did?

There’s a line, widely (though never concretely) attributed to Martin Heidegger, that speaks to precisely this:

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

It’s a heady thing to grapple with, this one unrepeatable life. Are we, in our maturity, sole survivors on a battlefield littered with the million people we never became? Do bodies pile high around us, the soil slick with our own blood-red potential? If every choice we make is also the abandonment of every available alternative, then life, it would seem, effects above all a narrowing: a garden of infinite possibility reduced to a single stem.

It’s a paralyzing thought. Paralyzing, certainly, for Follies’ Benjamin Stone.

Philip Quast as Benjamin Stone in Follies | 📸: Johan Persson

Ben stands alone with Sally Durant Plummer in the soon-to-be-demolished Weismann Theatre. The song he sings, “The Road You Didn’t Take,” begins with a series of suggested selves:

You’re either a poet
Or you’re a lover
Or you’re the famous
Benjamin Stone.

The logic is immediately suspect. Why must the poet and the lover be different people? Why can neither coexist with Benjamin Stone? From the very start of the song, Ben presents his own compromises as universal laws; “I chose this” is far harder to say than “there was no other way.”

The third-person “Benjamin Stone” is a public object, a figure to be admired, envied — pitied? — from a distance. He’s become a kind of monument, one might say. We feel, from the outset of his song, a gap opening up between the man singing and the man he’s singing about.

Ben continues:

You take one road,
You try one door,
There isn’t time for any more.
One’s life consists of either/or.

There is, undeniably, truth in this. Every choice excludes. To be in one place is not to be in another. To marry one person is not to marry someone else. To devote years to one ambition is to leave other abilities undeveloped, other skills unhoned, other lives unlived.

To become anyone is an act of subtraction.

But notice how Ben expresses that truth. He does not say, “I took one road.” He says, “You take one road.” Then, retreating further from the personal: “One’s life consists of either/or.” First “you,” then “one.” There’s no real agency, and therefore no real responsibility. One takes a road. One tries a door. One could hardly have done otherwise.

For the remainder of the song, Ben tries to convince himself that each road he didn’t take was best left untraveled. Those roads, after all, go through rocky ground, don’t they? And weren’t those undared dreams likely dead to begin with? What difference would an unread book or an unmet girl even have made? One by one, he dismisses these unlived lives, blocks each road with imagined rubble.

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But, to echo the princes in Into the Woods, was the way always barred? Ben, in the throes of his own kind of agony, proves a thoroughly unreliable narrator. Virtually every claim he makes in “The Road You Didn’t Take” is disproved by the act of making it. The road he didn’t take “hardly comes to mind,” yet he speaks of nothing else. He asks whether all those unlived lives could have made him sing — but, of course, that’s exactly the effect they’re having right now.

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Ben’s unreliability runs deeper than self-contradiction. Listen to what he actually produces when he reaches for those unlived lives: a poet, a lover, books, girls... Categories, not portraits. He gestures at silhouettes, at the blurred outlines of selves that were never given enough room to take on definition. And in this way, he tells the truth:

The choice you didn’t make
Never was defined,
Was it?

No. It wasn’t. And it’s that lack of definition which makes it so easy for us to dismiss our own roads not taken. It’s easier to forget the face you never saw clearly to begin with; it’s harder to mourn a self you barely knew. “Ignorance is bliss,” Ben sings. “What’s more,” he adds, “You won’t remember, you won’t remember at all. Not at all…”

The formal miracle of “The Road You Didn’t Take” is that it fails entirely as self-consolation and succeeds entirely as art. Ben’s defense falls to pieces; his grief bleeds through the wreckage. He proves, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the “blessed peace” he insists upon is in fact restless tumult — that his other selves were never really buried, only held down, and that they have been pressing upward against his certainty all along.

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“The Road You Didn’t Take” ends with one of the most haunting questions Sondheim ever penned:

The Ben I’ll never be,
Who remembers him?

Who remembers him? Sally says she does. She certainly recalls Ben as he was thirty years ago, and has preserved that Ben — her Ben — in amber ever since. We cannot help but remember that Ben too; we see (and hear from) his younger self twice during the song. But Young Ben does not need to be physically on stage to be present here. The Ben who no longer exists in the flesh still has form. He is certainly real to the older Ben, standing there in anguish — perhaps more real than his own carefully constructed self.

In its consoling reading, that Heidegger-attributed line (“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one”) describes the natural shape of a life honestly lived: the many possible selves of early life resolving, through choices made and owned, into the one self that a person ultimately, authentically becomes.

But the line bears another reading. A man can also die a single one because he slaughters all those other selves with his own hand. Intentionally, accidentally, it doesn’t matter: he spills that blood-red potential, he fills that corpse-strewn field. He can’t look down, can’t look back, so he fixes his eyes forward, calls the flat horizon before him a blessed peace. Never look back, never look back, never look back… We hear those words over and over again in Merrily We Roll Along, but they have pressed down upon Benjamin Stone for three decades. Under their weight, he has become singular: through suppression, through refusal, through denial.

And then “The Road You Didn’t Take” begins.

Ben cannot look back — and then, for a few precious, painful minutes, he does. He cannot remember — and then he remembers, with a specificity and a feeling that thirty years of the famous Benjamin Stone has not managed to extinguish. The blessed peace breaks open. The unlived lives press through.

The Ben we meet is a single stem. But for as long as this song lasts, the stem remembers it was once a garden. And a garden still can grow.

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