From Diogenes wandering about ancient Greece with his lamp looking for one honest man to the current furor over fake news, the search for truth has always been central to our human condition. I ran into this recently when I came across a quote from Robert Frost that is all over the internet. The quote is “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” This struck me as a wonderful quote to use in the discussion of what it means to be older.
Most of the users of this quote waxed rhapsodic over poetry, how much verse meant to them, and how wonderful this quote from one of Frost’s poems was. But not one of the many, many users of this quote cited what poem it was from. I was tempted just to use it, even though I did not know its provenance, but an ingrown respect for facts had me pick up my lantern and begin my search. I started with the internet and typed in the quote along with Frost’s name, but while I found hundreds of references to the quote, not one of them gave an attribution to a specific poem. I then went to the library where I spent a few hours going through all of his collected poems, but could not find that one line. Knowing that I could have missed it, I turned to the very nice research librarians at my local library. They sent me to the reference section where I spent another hour with various tomes with no luck. By then I had piqued the curiosity of these two nice ladies, and they were banging away on their computers as well. The only attribution we could find for this one wonderful line was ‘Swedish Proverb.’ As a last resort I emailed the head of the English department at the local college, but as yet I have received no answer.
Whoever started the explosion of this particular quote from Robert Frost made an unfounded assumption: poet plus quote equals poetry. Others picked it up and away we went. Perhaps Frost did write this, perhaps it is in a poem somewhere, perhaps it is in one of his letters, or perhaps he never wrote it at all. But the fact is we, or at least I, do not know for sure. And while the jury is still out, the ‘Frost poetry quote’ lives on and proliferates on the internet. Faced with modern social media, even Diogenes would have taken his lamp and returned to Corinth.