Frank Wedekind, German playwright, once said, “Monuments are for the living, not the dead.” Monuments have always been about honoring and remembering the decease. They are there for us to look upon and appreciate their meaning, but yet we do not engage with them at all. This argument is brought by Robert Musil in his essay, “Monuments,” where he explains how monuments are “conspicuously inconspicuous.” I agree with him as he mentions that as time passes on they are forgotten and become invisible to the people surrounding them. A good argument is that the people of this world need to pay more attention to their surroundings, in other words, they need to start noticing and become less thoughtless.
There is always a reason why monuments are built…show more content… We should take the time to appreciate them and make them noticeable, yet we do not do it. As I mentioned before, the time passes on and monuments have become unaware to us as they blend in more and more, because we have become accustomed to them. Although we stop to notice them at some point in our life, it does not mean we did not noticed at all. Which ties into a part of the essay, “Why Read the Classics,” by Italian journalist and writer, Italo Calvino, “A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us” (127). Although Calvino talks about “classics” or books, he makes a similar point to Musil, how the “classics” can be overlooked by the people surrounding them. For example, some people, especially young adults, choose to read more modern books including Twilight or Harry Potter. They tend to forget about our old famous “classics”, for instance, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Brave New World. Yet these classics are never truly forgotten, their text are still part of us and they still have a great impact on us as well as monuments. Which brings me back to a good point in Musil’s essay, where he explains that monuments have to try harder to make us take the time to glance at them and appreciate them as we once did before (63). Monuments have to engage our attention so we can have an opportunity to remember a historic moment or person. People