Fewer Landmarks
“Poor people's memory is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are gray and featureless.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE FIRST MAN
Camus grew up poor in Algiers, raised by a mother who could not read and a grandmother who was hard on him. In The First Man, left unfinished, he tried to describe what that does to a life.
His observation is quiet and devastating. Memory needs landmarks, and comfortable lives supply them. Trips, moves, changes of scene, occasions worth marking. A life spent in the same three streets doing the same work produces years that are almost impossible to tell apart afterward.
No sentimentality about the poor is involved. It is an accurate description of a specific loss, and it explains something about persistence. The people who keep going with the least to show for it are often the same people whose years leave the fewest traces. The work is not only unrewarded. It goes unrecorded.
Camus spent his career trying to give those lives their detail back. He believed that people treated as a mass deserved to be written down one at a time. You may not be able to change anyone’s circumstances. You can notice a life that is passing without landmarks.
Mark something. Write down one detail of an ordinary day so that this week stays distinguishable later.
