By Vladimir Brezina
This week’s Photo Challenge is Regret.
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…
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
... kayaked the waters around New York for more than 15 years in his red Feathercraft folding kayak. He was originally from (the former) Czechoslovakia and lived in the U.K. and California before settling down in New York. He was a neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He died in 2016.
... is a kayaker and technology researcher at Nemertes Research. She's an erstwhile engineer, particle physicist, and science fiction writer. She was born in California and has lived in Italy, Norway, Hawaii, and a few other places. She currently resides in New York City.
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Wind Against Current 
Stunning effect…with a deep thought to go with it.Yep, its hard to choose when 2 roads are laid in front of us…there’s always this question, “what if…” Cool black and white effect!
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The antidote is this!
Here are the lyrics, in French and English.
(It’s amusing to see “Je me fous du passé!” translated as “I’m happy of the past” when it really means “I don’t give a f**k about the past”…)
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It’s also amusing to see “Ni le mal, tout ça m’est bien égal” translated as “Ni le mal, tout ça m’est bien égal”. Must be a blip in the translation algorithm… :-)
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OK, I should have linked to this translation—much better, obviously done by a human.
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Lovely photo — and the poem fragment is a good choice. The regret seems to be resolved in the poem , “and that has made all the difference.” But our inability to have it both ways troubles us. Having taken one path we can never know what taking the other would have meant.
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Resolved, in a way…
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.
Regret is about the past, but how we resolve it depends on the stories we tell ourselves, and the rationalizations we make, in the present…
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Yes Frost tells it with a sigh. He had to choose but I think he is glad he took the road less traveled by (as you do in your kayak).
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Quite so :-)
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Love the photo :-)
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Thanks, Lynn!
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Very beautiful
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Thank you! And I like your classification of all the different interpretations of “Regret”!
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Pingback: 12 FEBRUARY 2012 : TO REGRET OR NOT TO REGRET–THAT IS AN INTERESTING QUESTION. « 2012 – ON THE BENCH
Black and white photos can be real knockouts, like this one.
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It didn’t start life as a black and white photo… but the colors it had seemed to contradict the “Regret” theme, so I got rid of them.
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Perfect take on the theme. Which road to take? Either one can lead to regrets.
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Closely related to the phenomenon of the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence…
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terrific photo and love the quote that you found
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Thanks!
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brill’ photo and words to match, excellent. ;)
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Thanks… actually the photo doesn’t quite correspond to the image I myself get from Frost’s poem, but it was the best I could do.
In particular, the “roads” and woods in the photo seem a bit too gentle and manicured to correspond to the poem, but then again regret is a relatively gentle emotion…
The history of that location, however, is not gentle at all. The photo was taken in England on one part of the battlefield of Bosworth, where in 1485 King Richard III lost his crown, and his life.
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greetings by
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Nice image. Where was it taken?
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See my answer to cobbies69 above.
More specifically, Bosworth Field, where the battle took place in 1485, is in the English Midlands not far from Leicester, where I spent quite a lot of time over the years and so visited Bosworth on several occasions. Today one can see there typical Midlands scenery
a gentle landscape of farmed fields with interspersed hedges, copses, a canal, lanes and paths, at the divergence of two of which I took the picture.
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Beautiful Post. What a thought to go with a stunning picture. Great choice of theme for this week’s challenge. Like it a lot.
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Thank you very much!
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Lovely photograph.
~Anne
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Thanks, Anne!
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Fabulous photo and verse … I am a big time Frost fan! Well done.
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Thanks! Actually, at first I had quite a different photo in mind and, to go with it, some verses of Larkin. But then I realized that Larkin is not a poet of regret—many other emotions, but not regret. Frost seemed much more appropriate to the theme…
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Pingback: Weekly Photo Challenge : Regret « Cheryl Andrews
Dr. Brezina –
Am I glad I stumbled across your blog. I’m an undergraduate student searching for graduate schools – my primary interest is in molluscan neuroscience, with a focus on cephalopods, but with an awareness that it is probably a good idea to work with Aplysia too. I have been poking around your lab webpage and the pages of the other PIs working at MSSM and I am impressed with the program in general.
I should also mention that I know one of your lab’s alums – you might remember a high schooler that worked with you named Aleksandr Kivenson? I’m his significant other. He pointed me toward your lab, actually.
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Hi, Katharine,
Talk about a stroll down memory lane! Of course I remember Aleksandr! I hope he’s doing well?
Anyway, please do contact me off the blog at vladimir.brezina@gmail.com if you want more information on our program or graduate school in general.
Hope to hear from you!
Vlad
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Yup. He’s about to finish up his PhD at Brandeis on modeling an adenosine kinase. (Before you think WHOA UNDERGRAD AND PHD? I’m 23 to his 26; I was ill during my late teens so I didn’t really get going on undergrad until late.) I’m learning a lot from his experiences about how to – and how not to – go through grad school, too, besides cheering him through his dissertation (and I expect he will do so for me too).
I will definitely contact you about the program; I have several questions about the Aplysia research program at MSSM and where my research interests might fit into it.
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Ph.D. already? How time flies…
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